The Interdisciplinary Approach

This is interesting - - from Educating the Next Steve Jobs by Tony Wagner in The Wall Street Journal (April 14, 2012):

The University system today demands and rewards specialization.  Professors earn tenure based on research in narrow academic fields, and students are required to declare a major in a subject area,  Though expertise is important, Google's director of talent, Judy Gilbert, told me that the most important thing educators can do to prepare students for work in companies like hers is to teach them that problems can never be understood or solved in the context of a single academic discipline.  At Stanford's d.school and MIT's Media Lab, all courses are interdisciplinary and based on the exploration of a problem or new opportunity.  At Olin College, half the students create interdisciplinary majors like "Design for Sustainability Development" or "Mathematical Biology."

This is the link to Stanford's d.school - -

http://dschool.stanford.edu/