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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

One of the key mistakes of educational strategy is dividing up knowledge into a bunch of subjects like "Language", "Math", and so on. You can find linkages in just about everything; this siloing really only serves to make people think they're particularly good at one thing and not another, when really it's a preference for one perspective over another.

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So the pragmatists question is then naturally, how do you teach it? How do you shard the curriculum if not by subject? It seems a bit overbearing to ask each teacher to have the proper renaissance man's education of knowing a bit of everything.

Classes are already discrete, and can thus be taught by different teachers.

As I understand, classifying classes into "disciplines" is for the convenience of administrative systems, like university deans. This classification is not a law of the universe, nor of the human mind. One can imagine the negatives of fitting learning into hierarchical administrative models.

To me, a teacher's proper role isn't having knowledge and dumping it into someone's brain. It's knowing where to find that knowledge. My three Rs are "reading, research, and reflection": a teacher's job is to (1) provide useful material to consume, via lecture or homework or whatnot, (2) point towards larger resources for further exploration, and (3) guide thought processes to make useful conclusions.

A teacher's job is not to teach. It's to provide a space in which a student can learn. A focus is useful for this, but the focus doesn't need to be an abstract subject. It's a MacGuffin; it can be anything.

I completely agree! By other's perspectives my hardest semester was when I took PDEs, Geometry Space-time (Minkowski), Algorithms, P-chem (Quantum Mechanics), and Analysis. However there was so much over lap with all the materials and topics. A few weeks after midterms all the course work just fit together like a 100 piece puzzle.

Taking as many physics courses as I have, I was getting worried for a while that there was nothing more to life than solving a boundary value problem in some domain or another.

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