On Being T-Shaped

1/13/2025

I take it that the aim of education is not to gain more and more detailed knowledge of the world but to understand the world and ourselves in it. If we split the world up in order to gain detailed knowledge of it, at some point we have to put it together again in order to understand it.

~R.M. Hutchins¹

There is a very good reason that we have organized education into disciplines. It is trite to observe that we live in an environment that is extremely complex, and our awareness of that complexity is growing every day. Each of the subjects we study in school includes a unique body of knowledge, skills, and attitudes; provides a unique perspective; and offers us unique tools for making sense of and responding to that environment. Because of the richness of these subjects, it is impossible for any one person to become an expert in everything. Over time, for both academic and economic reasons, our individual knowledge tends to become increasingly specialized.

While this specialization is both necessary and desirable, it also has side-effects. There is a danger of forgetting that these disciplines developed from a common human curiosity about the world. The reason why we have formal systems to educate ourselves is ultimately so we might come to common solutions about common problems. While mathematicians, musicians, geographers, and physicists may look at the world through unique lenses, they are not looking at unique worlds. This can be a challenge for academics; it is an even greater challenge for students who (much to the bewilderment of their teachers) often find it difficult to transfer learning in one class to tasks in another.

Ideally, what we want from our students is an appreciation for being 'T-shaped.'² That is, to pursue depth in their studies (the narrow vertical), and also achieve a level of breadth (the wide horizontal) in their understanding about the world in general. We know that few real-world problems are ever solved by specialists in only one domain; whether in academia, business, or government, the complexity of our challenges requires us to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams and to understand and be understood by specialists in other disciplines.

What is more, we know that students learn best (1) when they are engaged in investigation and problem-solving and not just knowledge acquisition and (2) when they work in groups that require them to examine those problems from different perspectives and reconcile competing points of view.³

Some people fear that these sorts of cross-disciplinary approaches are about breaking or watering down traditional subject knowledge. On the contrary, they make depth of learning in a discipline all the more important, because the distinct knowledge and skills are being used to address real-world challenges that matter to all of us.

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^{1 Robert Maynard Hutchins, The University of Utopia (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1969), 24.
2 See, for example, Andy Boynton, "Are You an ‘I’ or a ‘T’?" Forbes (18 October, 2011).
3 See Deanna Kuhn, “Thinking Together and Alone,” Educational Researcher 44(1), 46-63.}

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