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I missed Friday's symposium, but have been a long-time listener and contributor to conversations about fragmentation on Serendip. For a thorough account of the ways in which "the regime of specialization, narrowness of interest and inbreeding" led to "some of the greatest dangers of organization: dearth of originality, excess deference to authority, diffusion of responsibility," see Frederick Rudolph's history of The American College and University (1962; rpt. 1990). And for one account of current innovations that attempt to break down such partitions on the college level, see Synecdoche and Surprise: Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production.

What occurs to me, reading this newest set of field notes and commentary (which suggest that such college-level work is both fed by and feeds fragmentation in K-12 settings) is the conversation we had in the summer institute last Tuesday morning, about whether education involves "filtering" (teaching young students to become more discriminating in their sensory perceptions, for instance) or "elaborating" (teaching them to construct networks, to make new connections among disparate things).

Of course it necessarily involves both both...and it seems that another way to think about addressing this question of "fragmented education" is whether we want to encourage or discourage our students from the "dangers" of multi-tasking:

William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention. In “The Principles of Psychology” (1890), he outlined the differences among “sensorial attention,” “intellectual attention,” “passive attention” and the like, and noted the “gray chaotic indiscriminateness” of the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. ...

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation....today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.”