Summary
This paper looks in detail at the educational side of interdisciplinarity and recounts the philosophy and some practicalities of the implementation of University College London’s successful Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (BASc) degree. In particular, we consider ‘framing’ and ‘the ladder of abstraction’ as notions that are useful in the philosophy of education. It is hoped that some of the ideas, challenges and successes described here will be helpful to others wishing to implement interdisciplinary curricula in their own institutions.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
In the Western tradition, for much of the last 1000 years, to be educated has meant having a wide range of knowledge, interests and abilities. This was the ambition of the Liberal Arts curriculum in European Universities, from the foundation of Bologna in 1088 until roughly 1800, the aim of Humboldt’s Bildung in Germany in the nineteenth century, and the goal of the Anglophone revival of the liberal arts in the US in the eighteenth to nineteenth century, which continues to the present day. The concern to ‘specialize’ is a relatively modern worry that can be traced to Adam Smith’s ideas about specialization in an industrial workforce, the rise of scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines from the seventeenth century onwards and the increase in the sheer number of people who have achieved a high level of education over the last 200 years or so.
There are differences between “liberal arts”, liberal arts and sciences” and “interdisciplinary” as adjectives that can be applied to a broad curriculum.
‘Liberal arts’ was the dominant conception of the university curriculum for hundreds of years in Europe. This curriculum – usually parsed as the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic, plus the Quadrivium of arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry – always contained both what we would call arts and sciences – although these disciplinary distinctions did not then exist in the modern way. However, liberal arts, in some contemporary literature, has come to mean an agglomeration of what we now call humanities and non-quantitative social sciences. The moniker ‘liberal arts and sciences’ better reflects in contemporary language the heritage of the historic curriculum as well as its contemporary ambitions. What both these conceptions of the curriculum share, however, is the idea that education should be broader than a single (or perhaps even a couple of) discipline(s). This view of higher education they also share with the concept of an interdisciplinary education. However, interdisciplinary education, as distinct from either liberal arts or liberal arts and sciences, requires, in addition, some attempt to find a relationship between the disciplines, usually (but not exclusively) in the form of an explicit integration or synthesis of one or more disciplines.
At University College of London, the Arts and Sciences BASc Curriculum has been implemented. It shares some commonality with related curricula in liberal arts institutions in the US and elsewhere. Study time for each student is spent 50% on the Core of the degree and 50% on what are called Pathways. The Core is where the more radical inter-, post- and non-disciplinary modules are housed and the Pathways are selections of broadly cognate, more standard academic disciplines. In the Core, the frames need to be built. The frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. They are part of the cognitive unconscious of each of us, ‘structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access but know by their consequences [i.e., the affect these structures have on our assumptions and actions]. Compulsory first-year Core courses play and important role in the success of the program. Author’s view is that these modules frame the program in such a way as to provide intellectual, cognitive and moral support.
