WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE DISCIPLINES?

The disciplines certainly have their uses. We've created a society that can't function without highly specialized knowledge, and the disciplines provide that. But they aren't by any means the most useful or logical way to organize the general education curriculum.

What students need is a "mental filing system" organizing and making accessible in memory everything they know, a system that helps them distinguish between the important and the trivial, a system suggesting things they could know but don't, a system that makes clear the systemically integrated, mutually supportive nature of knowledge, a system that shows them the basic processes by means of which knowledge expands. 

And the system should do all of these things in ways the average adolescent can understand and explain.

WHAT  RESPECTED SCHOLARS SAY

Alfred North Whitehead: “[We must] eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of the modern curriculum.” (Presidential Address to the Mathematical Association of England, 1916)

Felix Frankfurter: “That our universities have grave shortcomings for the intellectual life of this nation is by now a commonplace.  The chief source of their inadequacy is probably the curse of departmentalization.” (Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education, Mentor 1948)

Neil Postman: “There is no longer any principle that unifies the school curriculum and furnishes it with meaning.” (Phi Delta Kappan, January 1983, p.  316)