I found the documentary “Most Likely to Succeed” to be very enriching, because it expanded my idea of how education can be ideated and structured. Firstly, I found in interesting to learn that our current education system is the descendent of a Prussian system that aimed to produce a more effective and better organized army. Because of my upbringing in conventional education, I always took the systemized division of learning and lesson by subject for granted. For someone with my educational background, appreciating the “interdisciplinary” nature of curricular subjects is as far out of the box as our thinking was allowed to go, while still being tethered to the idea of division by subject. It’s quite an ideological shift to be presented with a system like the one at High Tech High, where the term “interdisciplinary” is rendered arbitrary- the interrelatedness of subjects is assumed, and the lessons start from a point of cross-curricularity and procede within this assumed relationship.
An essentially cross curricular approach seems valuable for elementary and middle school education, because it encourages intellectual applications that might otherwise be hindered at the border between subjects. There exist potential issues, however, with reconciling this type of learning with higher level instruction from experts, however. In the world of academic specialty in higher education, the teachers are often experts in a specific topic. It would follow that students who are used to a cross curricular or subject integration approach would be unaccustomed to subject-specific lessons, and have trouble approaching their integration and interpretation.
The nature of academic specialization is artificial in that it does not reflect the processes of living and learning in the world. The integration of information across topics, subjects, and perspectives in a receptive and accepting manner is an important life skill that improves wellbeing on individual and interpersonal levels. Academic specialization at the expert level is also a practically necessitated fact: human intelligence, cognition, and lifespan often limit experts to narrower and fewer topics of expertise. Furthermore, the value of broad learning across topics that was favoured in the scholarly world of Ancient Greece and the European Renaissance has been replaced with an academic culture of specialization.
Ultimately, I believe that the merits of cross-curricular learning that is not limited by subject categories outweighs any re-orientation former students of this type of schooling might need in a post-secondary environment of academic specialization. It would be helpful if post-secondary institutions recognized and supported this transition through instruction designed for transitioning from cross-curricular learning to specific topics at the course level.
