In the age of Wikipedia, is it better to study everything?

The one-track mind of the current education system is flawed, says Andy Martin. The London Interdisciplinary School, the first new university to open in more than 50 years, aims to put it right

‘The world is everything that is the case … the totality of facts’ (iStock/The Independent)

Students are missing out. But it has nothing to do with not going to lectures – or wild parties either (except the illegal kind). The problem is so deep and yet so manifest, so visible, so normal, that most people don’t even notice it. Higher education is training you up to be an idiot savant. It’s not about what you learn, it’s about everything you choose – or are forced – not to learn. This learned ignorance starts at school and then gets reinforced and locked in at college.

Your life is assumed to be linear. Even before you know what you really want to do with your life, you have to specialise and commit to becoming an airline pilot or a plumber or studying humanities or going into the sciences. Like some kind of premature, pint-sized professor. And then you come off the tracks at a certain point when you realise everything else you are automatically excluding. A higher education is only a higher form of ignorance. Increasingly, we teach more and more about less and less. Most classic university courses, especially at Oxford and Cambridge, require students to repress the instinctive desire for unlimited intellectual exploration. Often they graduate feeling frustrated and lost (assuming they aren’t thoroughly depressed beforehand).

Fortunately, there is a new kid on the academic block, the London Interdisciplinary School, which finally aims to satisfy that basic instinct, to find out more about the world rather than fixate on a narrow and inward-looking curriculum. As Wittgenstein said: “The world is everything that is the case … the totality of facts.” The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS for short), launching later this year, can’t quite offer a degree in omniscience, but it would like to. “You can’t do everything about everything,” says Carl Gombrich, one of the forces behind the new institution. “But you can create your own network – that mitigates to some extent the sorrow.” LIS offers a higher education in the age of Wikipedia. I suspect it will make the status quo look increasingly archaic, analogue and out of touch.