Thinking Big: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Everything

Abstract

Our current fervor for highly specified standards for each academic discipline requires students to view reality as composed of fragmented and unrelated bits of information. Mr. Brady argues that what students really need a system for organizing and integrating what they know so that they can understand the picture. Buckminster Fuller once said, education has developed in such a way it will be the undoing of the society. Reading those words today, many may nod in agreement. Few, however, are likely to give the same reason as Fuller did for so bleak a prediction. Fuller most frequently remembered as the inventor of the geodesic dome -- the lightest, strongest, most cost-effective enclosing structure ever devised. He was an inventive genius, but he was also a college professor, cartographer, philosopher, naval officer, mathematician, poet, researcher, cosmologist, industrialist, engineer, environmentalist, advisor to business and government, holder of 25 patents, author of 28 books, and recipient of 47 honorary degrees. He aired his views on American education, including the judgment I quoted above, in the late 1980s in a speech delivered to a group that included college presidents. What you fellows in the universities do, he continued, is make all the bright students into experts in something. That has some usefulness, but the trouble it leaves the ones with mediocre minds and the dunderheads to become generalists who must serve as college presidents . . . and presidents of the United States.1 -- people who strive to see the -- don't get much respect in America. There no listing for Generalists in the Yellow Pages, no places are reserved for them on the faculties of high schools and colleges, and no employment ads seek applications from them. And what the big picture today? Intensifying clashes on the fault lines between religions, societies, and civilizations; continuing threats of terrorism; a shrinking middle class and a widening gap between rich and poor; the confusing of national power with national greatness; dishonesty in boardrooms; violence accepted as entertainment; vast wealth plowed into no-return-on-investment armament and conflict; increasing environmental degradation; lobbyist-dominated legislatures; unwarranted confidence in the world-improving ability of force; official tolerance of tax evasion and a general decline in a sense of civic responsibility; and an education system beset by ideologically driven policies. These related, big-picture issues are parts of a systemically integrated whole -- a whole that the education establishment not addressing. We send our graduates off with expertise in technology, banking, politics, medicine, law, and myriad other fields, staking our collective fate on their ability to manage crises as they pop up. But the old problems intensify and are joined by new ones. That the education system we have created might, as Fuller said, actually be a major cause of those intensifying problems does not seem to have occurred to us. I can find little evidence of serious, ongoing dialogue among policy makers about the wisdom of continuing to educate students narrowly. Neither can I find evidence of concern about potential societal chaos when millions of narrowly educated experts pursue their professions with little or no understanding of how their actions interact. Most of the college presidents and policy makers on the receiving end of Fuller's blunt accusation probably went back to their respective institutions and did nothing. Those few who actually undertook instructional program changes probably played with course distribution requirements; organized or expanded interdisciplinary programs; focused instruction on projects, social problems, or themes; put a capstone course in place; or tried to skirt the issue by emphasizing process rather than content. …

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