TEACHING OUTSIDE THE BOX: THE NEED FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION

As "Time Magazine" observed in its titling of 2006’s person of the year, “You:” every individual plays a role in constructing the world in the information age. In this paper, I argue that as our world moves further into the 21st century, the key to both success and progress is an understanding of how things are interrelated. Our global society has already enabled this sort of thinking with websites such as "Wikipedia," that provide internal hyperlinks to related contextual information, on any particular subject. My contention is that this sort of “interrelated” presentation of information needs to extend beyond the internet and into the classroom. In consequence, I assert that the goal of education should be to prepare students for an interdisciplinary understanding of the world. I think that education needs to move away from subjects being confined to a box, i.e. only literature is studied in English classes—only dates are studied in history classes, and instead, liberal arts courses, i.e. the humanities, need to be taught in order to inform one another. For example, in order to fully understand Matthew Arnold’s "Culture and Anarchy," a student needs to know the impetus and impact of The Reform Bill of 1867.