well-thought POS help? Building on Human Tendency for Interdisciplinary Thinking The human mind has always been solutionoriented. Going all the way back to our ancestors like the Australopiths and Homo habilis, we know that stone tools and spears were the early origins of engineering approaches. Medicine also grew early on. With the evolution of formal education, we
Students who join places like the IITs, for example, must be well-versed with many disciplines and must be able to adopt engineering for solving problems on how climate affects human health by building instruments to measure bacteria in the air or in the water in classrooms, busestrains-airplanes, and handheld probes creating digital libraries of genetic fingerprints. j
Indians led by establishing the first university at Nalanda and it even offered scholarships to international students from the other parts of Asia! Industrial scale printing revolutionized knowledge sharing. But the industrialization of education had an unintended consequence of creating disciplinary walls, which have since become great barriers for solution-oriented education. There is a new renaissance needed for bringing down the walls that inhibit a holistic and solutionbased approach to training the students. It can start at kindergarten level where technology can be used to have them use their cell phones to take pictures of insects, birds,
and plants to start mapping the biodiversity. Every step of the education from then on can be about integrating everyday life and nature into classroom teaching and using computer and communication technology to survey the planet and even the universe for the problemdu-jour and brainstorming about solutions. Students can begin to identify their natural talents and love in terms of what they would like to focus on – social or natural science, medicine, engineering, and so on while still staying within the solution-based approach of working on joint projects to address specific issues identified locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally. Education without ‘disciplinary’ borders should lead to schools without geographical boundaries and learning without mental barriers! Students will not be doing individual projects and thesis but will be part of a group that solves problems from end to end. The projects need not be limited to the school or the town or even the state or country but can include students from all over the World! So anytime an event occurs, a team will be in place to assist locally and remotely to solve the problem. Problems can range from droughts and floods to fires and wars or terrorism or industrial accidents or simply a rural woman trying to reduce her daily drudgery of gathering food, fuel, and water. Philosophy of Science for Livelihoods Individual innovation can still be nurtured and more intelligent and humane approaches can be developed for patenting and sharing wealth and being gainfully employed as a member of a team. Individuals can move from place to place and team to team based on their disciplinary expertise from engineering to social science to medicine to acting to sports to politics. Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and crossdisciplinary, and so on are all buzzwords
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