There is Such a Thing as Overspecialization

One key thing to note about the popular education and working structure of the world is specialization.  In a sense, it is important to a functioning system.  If you think about it in comparison to how a car work, each part of the car is specialized in one thing and it must do that one thing perfectly in order for the entire tar to work.  If one part starts to fail, the rest stops working correctly.  Specialization is important, but it is also limiting.  That door will only ever be a door.  The brakes aren’t cleaning the windows and the motor isn’t what holds the gasoline.  And the same goes for people.  Specialization causes the number of opportunities to get smaller and smaller, the more specialized you go.  Now, the term “discipline” comes from the Roman word “disciplina.”  It started being used as a term in education when education started to be related to economic and political manners.

“The production of knowledge and disciplinary specialization accelerated during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” (Repko, pg 65)  The Enlightenment, which was an intellectual movement throughout Europe that “emphasized the progress of human knowledge through the powers of reason and provided justification for the movement known as modernism” was the first of two movements that caused this acceleration.  The second was a scientific revolution that emphasized “reductionism” and “empiricism,” or greater specialization and research activity, respectively.  These two movements were the cause of people starting to divide sciences into different fields, specifically empirical versus natural sciences.

Over many years, the disciplines slowly grew more and more separate.  Eventually, what used to be just “science” was broken up into specific fields of study such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, history, philosophy and many, many more.  As is obvious, education went from “very broad” to “extremely specific.”  Today, you can further break down each of those categories into their own subcategories.

A late nineteenth-century philosopher by the name of Friedrich Nietsche was only one of several people who started to view these new disciplines as problems.  In his mind, they were symptoms of a larger, less-visible disease.  It was an interdependence of government, business and education.  The economic system started to rely on more and more specialization.  In order for the economy to keep growing, sciences needed to get more specific.

Boston, where the John Hancock Tower is much taller than the surrounding building, but stands out as different.  Photo Credit: Chris Devers, Mt Auburn Cemetery: View of Boston from Washington Tower, 2009

This is where we get to the overspecialization.  It is the concept that summarizes that new

disciplines are connected to power struggles or issues of self-interest in positions of power.  Members of the government and business sectors of the economy had their own agendas, pursuits that would further them rather than the general public.  They would require that more people study more specific things, continuing to specialize even when there may not have been a point.  This is still one of the problems with today’s higher-education system.  We push for that doctorate in that one field that we know more about than any other field.  But how many options does that leave us?  Suddenly our limited knowledge is overspecialized in a way that leaves us unable to grow in any other fields.  And that is where interdisciplinarity comes in handy.

 

Resources:

Repko, Allen F., Rick Szostak, Michelle Phillips Buchberger. Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies.California: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014. Print.

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