DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94892-5_6

Summary
We are at the beginning of a revolution driven principally by technology and involving other factors such as globalisation and problems of planetary scope. More nations are becoming knowledge economies in which services dominate and attributes such as creativity, flexibility, and collegiality are valued in white-collar and professional jobs at least as much as academic subject knowledge.
In higher education, we see a re-emergence of polymathy and generalism as both valued educational ambitions and central to the future of work. The example of the University College London Arts and Sciences is examined.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
Liberal arts and sciences will mean that sort of education usually taken to have begun with the writings of Varro and Cicero in Ancient Rome and later developed into the seven liberal arts by great medievalists such at Martianus Capella and Boethius. Such an education incorporated what we would now call both humanities and sciences. This concept of education dominated Western universities from the founding of Bologna up until the rise
of specialist technical institutions in France in the 19th century, and was recast first by Humboldt at the University in Berlin in 1810, and then in the USA where it survives today as liberal arts in many elite institutions.
In the next 10-20 years the G20 countries will become ‘knowledge economies’. They rely on 'intangibles' such as intellectual property, shares or digital or virtual goods. The rise of science and the professionalizing of academic work in Europe and the US gave rise to specialist journals and a gradual ‘siloization’ of academia; meanwhile, and in parallel, an economy of industrial specialization, grounded in Adam Smith’s division of labour and built on the new factories, rose and reached its apogee in Henry Ford’s conveyor belt of mass production and managerial Taylorism in the 20th century. To use an anti-postmodern phrase, a writing of the history of this period might claim that the 'tenor of the age' was one of specialization, siloization and certain forms of professionalization influencing all walks of life.

Point of Strength
We are entering an age in which greater connectivity (of information, products and people) and increased complexity bring significant and frequent changes to what is required in work outside universities. However, academic
disciplines, established in the West roughly during the late 18th and 19th centuries and now deeply ensconced in university cultures and organizational structures, can find it hard to mirror these changes and to respond.
An education that spans the non-sciences and the sciences one in ‘polymathy’.
A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas’ and continues, ‘such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems’.
Alternatively, we can use the term generalist. A generalist is a person who have the potential, the attitude and the aptitude to specialize in more than one discipline.