Education may be special or general. When it is special, we call those who acquire it specialised and the process through which they emerge as specialisation. Those who are not specialised we tend to belittle them as generalists or people who are of all trades.

 Since colonial times, education in Africa has been designed to produce specialists at the expense of the common good of generalists.  Yet our problems that we must solve are not specialised but general.  This is not surprising. During the Modern era in Europe where our colonialists came from, education had been designed to produce specialists. Actually initially, especially during the era of ancient philosophers, education was general for broadening the mind to enable people to use their knowledge to fit in their increasingly challenging environment.

Abstractive thinking actually helped the broadening of the mind during the modern times in Europe. However, soon, particularly, higher education, responded by going for specialisation instead of concentrating on early training on conceptual transferable knowledge (e.g. Epstein, 2019; Fieldman, 2022).

One may blame abstraction, which made development, transformation and progress during the Modern Era in Europe possible, for also having serving to limit more general knowledge for societal change by preferring specialization to general knowledge.

Specialisation, as Fieldman (2022) emphasises, is about the selective removal of variables, to enable the deepening of a singular skill or expertise of individuals. It produces men and women of great knowledge about less and less but ignorant about more and more, which society needs to survive through the times. In a way, education has shifted from aiming at the broad potential, which society needs, to narrow ends that serve the interests of individuals of knowledge acquisition, domination and transfer. So, while the primary goal of education is thinking and reasoning, these have been subordinated to the glorification of individuals.

Concurrently, philosophy, which is concerned with thinking and reasoning, has been squeezed out of the general body of knowledge, and made a separate branch of teaching and learning. The result is that virtually all our topmost products of knowledge, specialized as they are, are deficient in philosophy and, hence thinking and reasoning correctly.

Extremely few are knowledgeable in the art and science of critical thinking. The only connection to philosophy is when they get the Doctor of Philosophy (PhDs) degrees but without philosophy. This many explain why while we expect our PhDs to lead us in thinking and reasoning, they lead us in squeezing these two qualities of education out of knowledge. 

Each PhD is a specialisation in a narrow field of knowledge within a small academic tribe (discipline) within a broad territory of knowledge that may be social science, humanities (arts) or natural science and associated professions. There is virtually no interaction between graduates from different territories and tribes of knowledge.

What we see is that right from primary school to university, young people are taught that the world is predictable. As Fieldman has recorded in his article “Rethinking Education”, we teach rules in language, biology, physics, history, chemistry and mathematics, to name but a few. Then we test for acuity in fact retention or rote regurgitation, which we evaluate and give grades, some to be celebrated or dismissed as useless.

 In Uganda, schools and universities are competing for recognition on the basis of grades earned in rote regurgitation. At university, if one can regurgitate the notes of lecturers and professors, one can earn a First Class or Second Upper degree and be selected for further studies, with deficiency in thinking and reasoning. When they graduate, they are the ones who will man our institutions and be expected to think and reason for us.

The development, transformation and progress of our society will be in their hands. Apparently, without proficiency in critical thinking and reasoning, they will almost certainly be manipulated by an adroit ruler or leader. Frustrated, they so frequently turn to stealing public funds to make themselves rich. Public service does not matter anymore.

In effect our education system equips us well for things we have experienced before and expect to stay that way, while leaving us extremely ill-equipped for everything else. The thinking of our graduates is so highly specialised in a manner that the modern world has demanded of us but cannot help us deal with our accumulating complex and wicked problems. As Fieldman has correctly observed it is thinking that is increasingly obsolete. It means our graduates are becoming obsolete as soon as they graduate in their hundreds or even thousands, at huge financial and social cost.

What is the use of continuing to produce graduates whose knowledge and themselves will be obsolete as soon as they emerge into the bigger society through the university gates unless the aim is to create a cadre of modern-day slaves whose heads are full of knowledge that we no longer need to push our country to another level?

Besides, even before they stream out of the university gates, they have forgotten most of what they were tortured with as knowledge, will only remember about 10 per cent of it and this is what they will start with to get re-trained by society. Increasingly they will go into spaces where their rote knowledge will not be needed. Specialisation will be a roadblock to fitting in the wider society, which is not disciplined. Epstein (2029) was right.

We are living in “A rapidly changing ‘wicked’ world, which demands conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.” We, therefore, need to quickly rethink education to train for now and the future, not for the past.

Specialisation may have been very desirable in the past. Unfortunately, it is today the enemy of creative thinking and holistic thinking, which are necessary to make our generation fit in our wicked world of wicked problems, that cannot be solved by people of backward-looking minds hard-wired to specialise.  It can be an uphill, often insurmountable, battle to grasp things that challenge our well-formed and deeply grooved beliefs (Fieldman, 2022).

As Jack Cecchini, one of the world’s great multi-genre musicians cited by Anthony Fieldman, said there is a huge difference between creation and re-creation. It is also true that there is a huge difference between thinking and rethinking. We must rethink education right now. In the past, we thought education for specialisation was the right way to go. We must now rethink it for solving our problems.

We have been making the error of thinking that specialists can solve our non-specialist-loving, complex and wicked problems. We must rethink the error. Rethinking education must correct this error. Fortunately, we now have styles and types of thinking that we must adopt quickly before this century of new and different knowledge production comes to an end. These styles and types of thinking are. Interdisciplinary thinking, cross-disciplinary thinking, transdisciplinary thinking and extra-disciplinary thinking. 

The earlier we open up to these styles and types of thinking the better. We shall begin to create a cadre of thinkers who can think critically and are comfortable participating in team approaches to solving problems. Otherwise, our specialists will not only continue to be our main problem of the 21st century, but also their solutions will continually be our new problems, more complex than those they set out to solve.  Time to recognize the limits of specialization arrived long ago. We must wake up.

David Epstein (2019) examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields – especially those that are complex and unpredictable – generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.

Generalists often find their path late and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile and able to make connections than their more specialized peers can’t see. Besides, they can be versatile writers across the artificially delineated fields of knowledge.

Hear what Epstein says: “In totality breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer [of knowledge]. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

The ten-million-dollar-question: Specialists or generalists for 21st century and beyond?

For God and My Country

Further reading

Athony Fieldman (2022). Rethinking Education. Empirics Asia.

David Epstein (2019). Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Columbia Alumni Cener.