Taxonomy: Education’s Method of Profiling

Throughout my years of school, I’ve always taken it for granted.  It has always been there, seemingly obvious in reason.  I never questioned it.  Schools profile.  You’ve heard the term if you’ve watched CBS’s Criminal Minds.  Profiling is, in short, examining someone’s or something’s traits in order to fit them into a particular subgroup.  Well, think about it.  This is everywhere!  I never thought about it, but even the school systems do it.  Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geology.  Drawing, Painting, Music, Sculpting.  Ancient History,  U.S. History, World History,  European History.  British Literature, American Literature, Grammar.  French, Spanish, German, Latin.  These all feel normal when grouped together, right?  Well I just profiled those classes.  Or, I made a Taxonomy of Disciplines.

“Taxonomy groups things according to their common characteristics” (Repko, pg. 93).  Natural Sciences, Arts, History, Language Arts, Foreign Language.  You could call these the subgroups that these groups of classes would fit into.  The disciplinary way of schooling often uses this method of classification.  They classify everything into disciplinary categories.  There are common disciplinary categories that you will see at colleges and other academic establishments.  Repko lists the following: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts, Applied Fields (communications and business), Professions (architecture, nursing, education).

Many schools offer multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary programs that combine these disciplinary categories.  Programs like Environmental Science, for example, could be comprised of several courses under the “Natural Sciences” category.  The tricky thing about Taxonomy, as with any profiling, is that it is very subjective.  One school may consider a class to be part of one category, when another school considers it part of a different category.  This can cause some confusion for anybody who may transfer from one school to another and find that something they were studying may not be offered even if the overarching category that they consider their subject to be part of is offered.

In the end, Taxonomy is just another classification of a world full of classifications.  Our system is built on classification, therefore you can forever classify everything into smaller and smaller categories.  I imagine the only foreseeable end would be the study of a single letter in a single alphabet.

Resources:

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

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