Tackling local and global problems require multidisciplinary thinking and the schools of the future will adjust by educating students in multiple disciplines, doing away with the confining specializations that are dominant today.

by Queena N. Lee-Chua

	The next decade will see the emergence of technology-enhanced education and multidisciplinary teaching. [photo courtesy of the Fund for Assistance to Private Education]

MY FRIENDS and I were "martial-law babies," and as we were growing up we were taught contemporary national history whitewashed to suit a dictatorship. It was only in the mid-1980s that we realized corruption permeated the bureaucracy, with the Ministry of Education near the top of the list. Even under well-intentioned appointees, there was no way it could effectively fulfill its constitutional mandate to provide quality education for every Filipino.

Now in my 15th year as an educator, I reflect on the role of the government in this regard. For a decade now I have been helping the Department of Education (DepEd) in international representations, textbook evaluation, teacher training, program critiques, and outreach projects. True, corruption still exists, textbooks are still insufficient, and many teachers are still mediocre. But under the dynamic leadership of the last few education secretaries (some lured from the private sector), momentous changes have materialized in the past years: the revision of basic education curriculum, the creation of the bridge program, the training of public school teachers in top universities, and the cooperation of civic groups in establishing centers and funding scholarships.

Despite 9-11, the Iraq war, and the renewal of the age-old clash between ideologies, the world in 2015 will be virtually democratic. Globalization, with its concomitant magnified pros and cons, will be the norm. The Philippines in 2015 will be a functioning democracy, with concerned citizens, vibrant media, and a more participative government. With patient and rigorous examination of the programs initiated in the 1990s, the DepEd will be able to set an example of what can be achieved when the public and private sectors work together in a linked world. This development will be accompanied by two more major trends in education: technologically enhanced teaching and a growing need for interdisciplinary expertise.

The former is already discernible today. As for the latter, yes, students continue to stampede to nursing schools, but interdisciplinary education has been the trend for the past few years, too. When I was chairperson of the curriculum committee at Ateneo de Manila University two years ago, I would sift through stacks of proposed courses from different departments: communication with technology? Mathematics with finance? Business with information systems? Several proposals were approved, because tackling local and global issues now call for multidisciplinary thinking.

To think that in 1983, my friends had prided themselves on being only the second batch in Ateneo history to pursue double majors in mathematics and computer science. But even then, some of them had felt these combinations were not enough. Those who wanted to be entrepreneurs knew they needed accounting and marketing; others with an artistic bent would have loved to take fine arts and communication. Elective courses were always possible, but everyone was eager to graduate in four years.

	Problems still beset the Philippine educational system, but the dynamic leadership of a succession of education secretaries has brought about momentous improvements. [photo by Jose Enrique Soriano]

BY 2015, the possible course permutations will be endless, given the same time spent in earning a degree. De La Salle University Fellow and former DepEd undersecretary Isagani Cruz says that the rise of interdisciplinary education is partly a response to the needs of the labor market. "We will always flock to where the demand is, whether in hospital administration, other areas of medicine, or multidisciplinary fields," he argues. "As for liberal education, what may be the most relevant is one that is science-based-in short, integration between the classical humanities and the sciences."

Fr. Bienvenido F. Nebres, S. J., Ateneo de Manila president and a long-time implementer/adviser of international and national education initiatives also says, "Students are starting to realize that they can no longer specialize in just one thing. They realize they have more things to learn. We have management students who take lots of computer courses, fine arts majors who want to have a background in finance. Perhaps the most striking trend I have noted in the last 10 years is the huge increase in career and life options, which is a mirror of the cross-disciplinary trend happening in the world as a whole."

This interdisciplinary trend, however, is not new. Let's take the case of science. In 1992, as a response to the aversion towards fragmented learning shared by many of my students, I argued that specialized ivory-tower science was but a reaction to world events.

I wrote in Pantas: the Ateneo Journal of Higher Education, "Little do most people know that modern science has journeyed through the travails of history, and much as it has shaped the contours of our world, is as much a victim of societal forces and historical vicissitudes as, say, culture and music. Much less do people know that the scientific method is not the textbook invention of a group of brilliant 17th-century Western thinkers as much as it is the inevitable response to a stifling, feudalistic, medieval world view-such response accompanied by the expansion of trade, the stirrings of democracy, the blossoming of art in the Renaissance. And least of all do people know that the greatest scientific minds of all time, such as Aristotle, Da Vinci, and Einstein, are those who, aside from an unfettered curiosity and passionate desire to delve into nature, also possess in highest degree a deep love for beauty in all its manifestations and an almost mystical reverence for the divine."

In ancient philosophy, there are no differences between what we now term art, religion, or science. After all, literally, wisdom has no boundaries. But as the centuries pass, conflicts arise, especially when politics comes into the picture-remember Galileo versus the Church?

Let's fast-track to the Renaissance: "The far corners of the earth become more accessible, the energy of nonhuman sources is rapidly leashed, and Archimedes's ancient proclamation — Give me a lever and I can move the world — attains more conviction as the years pass. As nature yields some of her secrets, many more are glimpsed, and science has no choice but to specialize: chemists to delve into the structure of matter, physicists to investigate fundamental forces, biologists to account for living things, mathematicians to append a logical structure to it all. Along the way, recoiling against the otherworldliness of the stagnant medieval view, science gets into various conflicts with religion, and insisting on a uniform method and rigid experiment, it divorces itself from art."

Such fragmentation could not last forever, though. "As early as the opening decades of the 20th century, the paradoxes of relativity and quantum mechanics have begun to make physicists doubt their traditional view of nature, space, and time. During the middle years, the construction of computers has forced Boolean logic and electronics to transcend their usual realms. At the close, with the rise of catch-all terms like genetic engineering, cognitive science, information technology, workers from various disciplines are at last re-forging communication links thought lost for all time."

This interdisciplinarity resounds throughout the major human endeavors of today — the human genome project, artificial intelligence, the search for the top quark, environmental preservation, the quest for an AIDS cure, the eradication of world poverty. The most significant questions cannot be solved by a group of specialists alone. Only with the concerted effort of workers from diverse fields will the answers finally come to light.

Queena N. Lee-Chua, Ph.D., is an associate professor of mathematics and psychology at the Ateneo de Manila University. A TOYM and Metrobank Outstanding Teacher Awardee, she writes a weekly science column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and represents the Philippines on the Governing Board of the Southeast Asian Regional Centre for Math and Science Education.

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