Multi-Disciplinary Education Is The Need For The Present And Future

Dishan Kamdar Oct 17, 2018

Once upon a time in India, mere specialization was regarded as sufficient for employability. A technical degree in medicine, engineering, law etc. was prized above all, while multi-disciplinary education, or liberal education as it is also known, was seen as a kind of ivory-tower pursuit, with purely intellectual but not practical benefits. This perception was never accurate, but in modern times the reality can be seen clearly, and it is the reverse. Ask yourselves, for instance, who is more valuable to a modern tech company: someone who only knows Math/ programming, or someone who also understands design, social-media communication, and critical thinking? The same is true across sectors. The breadth of mind is no longer an extra, but an essential to employability and especially to career growth. Let’s examine why -

Today, the world has come closer, thanks to different technological advancements. For their viability, organizations have to be able to engage with global issues, economic, social, political, environmental, and to be sensitive to clients and customers with different cultural attitudes. These are times when the stock of a company can crash because of an insensitive comment on social media. In the tech age, personal biases and prejudices do not remain hidden, so it is important to quickly overcome them. Further, when all are so connected, it is less feasible than ever to burn bridges with anybody- i.e., it is unprofessional to be unforgiving. Naturally, then, broad-mindedness, tolerance, communicativeness and aesthetic sensibility are at a premium in the marketplace. It is clear that leading companies are looking for critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and a capacity to manage across borders, among their employees, and are training them to acquire these competencies. And it is such skills that are emphasized in multidisciplinary education.

Multidisciplinary education is the need of the present and the future. With technology ruling every aspect of our professional and personal lives and changing possibilities, disruption has become a buzz-word. Platforms for doing business alter rapidly, modes of communication suddenly become fashionable and then obsolete. People’s preferences are themselves more subject to change than ever before- because of the constant bombardment of new ideas, and new options, from all over the world. Graduates entering this world must be adept at handling such changes. A too-great veneration for one kind of a specialization is a recipe for disaster in today’s world as it can possibly close options in the here today, gone tomorrow pace of change. In a multi-disciplinary education, a student is not taught what to think but focusses more on how to think. This fosters intellectual curiosity, a critical thought process, self-reflection, leadership and teamwork skills, a sense of commitment, professionalism and a heightened sensitivity to one’s socio-cultural environment. Students get to develop abilities to connect and integrate knowledge and helping them to apply it in current and future real-world scenarios.

. We can also see that the primacy of multi-disciplinary education has always been a fact. In the modern, global economy, this fact is simply being revealed more and more. For instance, students from India and China have long been the best at cracking standardized tests. Yet, innovation has not come from either of these countries, but from the West, because the West has been the bastion of liberal education in recent history. Generally speaking, Indian IT professionals continue to provide back-end support to ideas designed elsewhere. So what is missing in our IT revolution is innovation and creativity. Likewise, in other fields, home-grown originality has been lacking. We can trace this back to a deficit in liberal education. Considering that there was an era when Indians were pioneering original thought and research, far ahead of the rest of the world, it is high time we regained our stature.

I see this state of affairs as a great opportunity for Indian educationists. Our education needs to overhaul itself. Not only is this the mandate of the changing world, it is also an urgent necessity for India in particular. We will be the youngest country in the world in 2030, with 170 crore college-age students. Can we cater to them with high-quality multidisciplinary education to be the thought-leaders of the future, or will we keep them entrapped in silos of thinking, the world’s backroom brigade? This is the question of our times, in higher education.