An Interdisciplinary Approach to STEM Education Through Reconsideration of A Classic on Education

Our paper addresses the issue of STEM education within the larger context of interdisciplinary education. We ask: Is an interdisciplinary approach to education, in particular to engineering education, superior, in some sense, to one that is narrower but deeper in content, a specialized education wherein a person learns about and studies the cutting edge recent discoveries or theories that are understood by only a handful of people in this world? Our thesis is that such an interdisciplinary approach can indeed be superior to, and enhance, a field-specific education. We pose several major questions in regard to STEM education, and then suggest an approach to address these issues from the perspective of a major classic in the field of education. We apply the insights of that classic to these questions, concluding with references to parallel insights from others who have engaged these same issues both in education as well as in the application of our suggested approach in the realm of scientific research.