In Nature for March 23, Philippe Baveye, an educationist, has urged the point that, in education, generalisation, rather than narrow specialisation, conveys an enormous advantage in all fields of knowledge and culture. We have a need, he maintains, to produce individuals possessing breadth of vision.
Unfortunately, the trend within our present society is to use our educational system to turn out specialists who may be profoundly ignorant of aspects of knowledge and background culture which lie outside their immediate province.
It has become customary to blame schools, both elementary and secondary, for the increase in cultural ignorance from which we suffer. Nevertheless, the ability of a school to provide all the material for a broad outlook is very limited.
Most children spend most of their time with family or friends, and not in school, and it must be the responsibility of parents to encourage diverse intellectual interests in their offspring. They are the only people who can plant the seed of cultural and intellectual curiosity. Colleges and universities can help nurture this outlook, but there are powerful forces within the educational system which are pressing for greater and greater specialisation, driven by the spur of competition.
In the last resort, the baneful outcome of cultural specialisation is some form of fanaticism, where individuals are no longer open to ideas which they have learnt as foreign. This is defined as extravagant or unreasonably zealous enthusiasm. In its primitive form it denoted the narrow-minded devotion to the cause of a god and his priests, allowing no digression from a dogmatic and authoritarian approach. We see something of fanaticism in our modern political factions, where freedom to think in any divergent fashion is not tolerated. And in other fields of endeavour such as archaeology and history we have to reckon with fanatics.
I never cease to wonder at the stupid interference with some of our ancient monuments which some fanatics insist upon perpetrating. Some enthusiast, incapable of balanced reasoning, decides that our Bronze Age ancestors mistakenly aligned a row of stones. The fanaticist who knows better goes out of his way to alter such ancient structures to conform with his own concept of lines-of-force, whatever those may be. He disputes numbers and dispositions of stones, and may even attempt to destroy a monument by fire. Such is ignorance.