Interdisciplinary Education: A policy for the future

We live in a reality with two nuances: The first is that now more than ever we are on the brink of an unprecedented crisis , be it climate change, loss of biodiversity and natural territories, scarcity of resources, threats of nuclear wars and pandemics, etc. and all this will be inherited by our descendants who will have to face it, so long-term thinking is crucial to address the complex problems of our time and ensure the interests of future generations. The second is that we have to change the way we work to solve real-world problems in real time. For, despite growing awareness of these challenges, our responses are often insufficient, fragmented and disjointed.

An example of this situation is what happened with Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist whose speech to the United Nations General Assembly attracted global attention and raised awareness of the urgency of climate change. While a movement was started that expressed the urgent need for change, world leaders continued to fail to take global action with wide-ranging impact. We need more than a voice, we need concrete and supportive action.

It is undeniable that giving young generations a voice is an important first step on the road to considering their interests, needs and contributions to such unprecedented challenges as those we are experiencing and those to come, however, to ensure their active participation governments must go beyond giving them a voice and instead implement interdisciplinary educational policies that promote collaboration and innovation at all levels.

The aim of this essay is to explore the importance of interdisciplinary education as a policy to foster innovation and sustainable development, and to ensure that the interests of future generations are taken into account. In particular, it focuses on how governments can implement interdisciplinary education policies to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation at all levels, from school to university. To truly understand the importance of this measure, the opinions of experts in the field of interdisciplinary education will be presented.

Interdisciplinary education has been identified as a key approach to preparing students for the complex challenges of the future, including sustainability issues and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

According to an Oxford reference from the "Dictionary of Environment and Conservation," interdisciplinarity can be defined as the application to the same task or project of knowledge and skills from different academic disciplines or subjects that are normally considered distinct.

It is intended to propose that this approach should be incorporated from primary education, changing the approach of isolated individual subjects that maintain many obsolete educational systems, in knowledge acquired and applied in projects that involve the application of various disciplines in order to be developed and solve useful problems of society.

To emphasize the relevance of interdisciplinary education, we have the perspective of Rafael Yuste, a renowned Spanish neurobiologist, quoted in the book "Create or die! How to reinvent ourselves and progress in the age of innovation", by Andrés Oppenheimer, who provided an analogy that can be applied in this context: creating a solution from a single discipline is like trying to see a movie through a single pixel on the screen; you need all the pixels to get the big picture.

The application of educational policies can be illustrated through a simple example using a problem in my country Bolivia: the drought of Lake Titicaca whose interrelated factors such as lack of rainfall, overfishing, agriculture and tourism contributed to the drought. By approaching the problem from multiple perspectives considering socio-political, economic, climatological, environmental factors, etc., students would find a solution promoting scientific knowledge, social awareness and practical action.

On the other hand, the excessive focus on individual disciplines in the educational system has contributed to the fragmentation of knowledge and a limited vision for students in their understanding of reality. Government policies that promote interdisciplinary education represent concrete actions that can break through this fragmentation and connect disciplines in a meaningful way.

As Yuste mentions in the aforementioned book, "it is increasingly clear that the solution to a scientific problem often comes from mixing approaches from different fields, which is why scientific work is increasingly interdisciplinary.

Therefore, we cannot limit the vision of young people; we must provide them with an interdisciplinary education that allows them to address these challenges with concrete and effective solutions.

The relationship between the interdisciplinary approach and innovation becomes necessary in a world where challenges are becoming increasingly complex and global and innovative solutions are required to address them. To understand this relationship, it is relevant to refer to the words of Mark Dodgson, David Gann and Ammon Salter in "The Future of Innovation" which states that "Innovation is increasingly a collaborative process, requiring the integration of knowledge from different disciplines and sectors. This requires new forms of collaboration and new ways of thinking about innovation that go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries." And from Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" who says that: "Interdisciplinary research is essential for scientific progress, since it allows researchers to approach problems from multiple perspectives and to develop new ways of thinking about old problems".

As a conclusion, the implementation of interdisciplinary education as a government policy is an effective strategy to foster the engagement and preparation of future generations. While innovation alone may not be the only solution to current and future challenges, it certainly presents itself as a unique and powerful approach to address the multiple dimensions of the complex problems that plague the world. By adopting this approach, we are not only equipping young people with the tools and skills necessary to address these problems, but we are also laying the foundation for building an education system that is more interconnected in its content and with practical relevance in solving real world problems and not limited to theory that is never put into practice and never becomes palpably useful in our lives.

Sofia Méndez Roca.