I’m a big fan of Seth Godin’s work. Seth is an author, entrepreneur, and most of all, a teacher. His one-line bio simply reads “30 years of projects.” He’s written eighteen bestselling books and has over a million readers for his more than 7,000 daily blog posts. Think about that for a minute. Every day for nearly twenty years he’s published a blog post. That is extraordinary. While he muses about any number of things, he mostly challenges the status quo, our usual way of thinking and behaving. And I think that’s why I’m so drawn to him – for the challenge – because he continually wants us to think in broader terms. Not just in terms of our immediate surroundings and everyday actions, but in terms of their larger import.
I particularly like his blog post titled “Maps and Globes”: “If someone needs directions,” he says, “don’t give them a globe. It’ll merely waste their time. But if someone needs to understand the way things are, don’t give them a map. They don’t need directions, they need to see the big picture.”
I keep this analogy top of mind. It’s a reminder to think broadly and with context rather than deeply and narrowly. Where academic study is concerned, it’s meant to encourage us to consider the more general relevance of our particular fields.
There’s currently a big push in education to pursue certain (“hard”) STEM disciplines at the expense of other (“softer”) arts and humanities disciplines. Returning to metaphors of navigation, received wisdom suggests that when you come to the proverbial fork in the road – that deciding moment when a choice of majors is required – you should move towards all hard disciplines. But what if, instead of seeing our choice as a fork in the road, we saw it as a T? At the T you’re deep in your chosen discipline (vertical), while also understanding the broader context or implications of your discipline across various fields of study (horizontal). The “T” analogy suggests all disciplines are valuable. We need the hard and soft disciplines; we need STEM and humanities. Go deep (vertical) into the discipline that drives your natural curiosity and fuels your soul. Go broad (horizontal) in a range of fields so that you can understand your discipline in terms of the broader context.
The T analogy makes much more sense to me. It highlights the value of having a frame of reference in relation to your field of study. It enables you to think in the broadest terms possible. We have what’s in front of us, and what it means in terms of the bigger picture. It’s maps and globes. The map is the way; the globe is the context.
Far too often this education discussion becomes an either/or contest. Go left or go right at the fork. We pursue one path at the expense of another. We’d be far better served if we thought in terms of interdisciplinary connectivity. Learning application at the intersection of the T. By combining our discipline specific knowledge with the perspectives from multiple fields of study we achieve higher-level understanding because our application crosses boundaries. And if there’s one thing we need more of in this hyper-connected world it is more understanding of what lives at the intersections. In the T model, maps and globes coexist.
Ancora Imparo… (Still, I am learning)
