Chapter 7 Interdisciplinary Education: Are We Faced With Insurmountable Opportunities?

discussed the relationship of interdisciplinarity to the disciplines and some of the features of the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary inquiry and education. Of course, a concern with a narrow focus on the disciplines predates my 1976 article. In the first part of the century, Dewey (1916, 1933, 1938) implicitly attacked a narrow formulation of the disciplines as the basis for education in his elaborate theory of the role of experience in learning. Similarly, the National Association for Core Curriculum, in its Core Teacher series, has been plumping for interdisciplinary education for over 40 years. In the last 15 years, however, interest in interdisciplinary matters has increased significantly. The interest has been especially noteworthy in higher education. For example, Jane Roland Martin (1982) has questioned what she calls the dogma of God-given subjects in order to try to build a more adequate curriculum that does not rely solely on the traditional disciplines and that finds a place for such paradigm examples of inter