As kids we used to play “52 Card Pick-Up.” It starts by asking an unsuspecting friend, “Do you want to play 52 Card Pickup?!” “Well, I’ve never played before, but sure,” he says.

You then throw the deck in the air, let the cards separate and fly around the room, and say, “Okay, your turn. Pick-up!”

Something like that is going on in education. It has to do with the movement to discard the academic disciplines in favor of teaching students “what they really need to know” or introducing them to “the real world.”

The disciplines, however imperfect they may be, provide—well, discipline. They bring organization and accountability to the curriculum. A college education is not like "52 Card Pick-Up", whereby you throw up the deck of cards and let them land where they will. The curriculum must be organized in some reasonable fashion. It's a practical matter.

Academic disciplines have a long pedigree. Some of the disciplines go back for two millennia, when Aristotle taught his class in physics, and then his class “after physics” on philosophical principles—the Metaphysics. The Trivium and the Quadrivium coalesced in the Middle Ages. The Trivium consists of logic, rhetoric and grammar; the Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. These are still pretty good checklists for a good education. You will occasionally find them in private schools or as the organizing scheme in home schooling curricula. The results are usually SAT scores between 1300 and 1500.

The organization of the disciplines has refined over the centuries. Although the disciplines may be criticized for too narrow a focus for the “real” world, they, in fact, provide these subject building blocks precisely to insure that students are equipped for the real world. Otherwise, it is “hit or miss.”

So, in abandoning the "disciplines" and giving students "what they really need to know" we are discarding a proven method of organization--admittedly arbitrary, imperfect, Western, "logo-centric," "traditional" etc.--in favor of a new scheme of organization that is arbitrary, unproven, and may vary according to the personalities and prejudices of those involved.

One of the movements to discard the disciplines is sometimes—ironically—what is called “interdisciplinary studies.” If one means by “interdisciplinary studies” the opportunity to approach a subject of study, say the Renaissance, by coordinating studies from history, art, music and philosophy, then such an approach is unobjectionable. To the contrary, it is tactically shrewd, given that those who teach the respective courses are competent if not expert in their fields. I myself teach a course entitled “War and Shakespeare,” a class combining literature, political philosophy, and military history. I feel barely competent but the outcome seems to justify the risk, especially as I’ve asked my respective colleagues in related disciplines—History and English, for example—to look over my shoulder.

But something more is going on in the attempt to reorganize the curriculum. The first clue should be the habitual denigration of traditional disciplines and subject matter, which is often branded “isolated” and “self-contained.” The disciplines, it is said, have performed a “major disservice” by “dividing problems in little pieces.” Such self-serving “compartmentalization,” it is said, has exacted a heavy price on society by frustrating human progress.

Removing the disciplines, however, also removes accountability. Who is minding the store? We may not like the standards applied but at least we know whom to blame.

But how do we assess the merit of a recent interdisciplinary program "Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary Hip Hop”? Who are the experts? Howard Stern? 2Pac? And from which department is assessment made? Music? Philosophy? Dance?

Once conventional oversight is removed, mischief may arise: A graduate student of a major U.S. university recently complained, “While the catalogue says that the History Department ‘encourages interdisciplinary approaches,’ the reality is that, unless you want to do something on ‘medieval women’ or ‘medieval sexuality,’ the department will not accommodate your interdisciplinary interests.”

Although guilt by association can be misapplied, it is worth noting that some interdisciplinary studies are too often allied with the worst ideas in academia today.

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the “Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Studies Certificate” is an “interdisciplinary study” program. An interdisciplinary format also accommodates the program of Queer Studies at Wesleyan, leading students into erudite studies like “Queer Knights: Lancelot and Galehaut (FREN 232) and “Queer Kids” (AMST 295), where students are sure to catch the cinematic classic “Totally F*****-Up Boys.”

At George Mason University, Arts and Sciences Dean Daniele C. Struppa tries to explain interdisciplinarity by a series of increasingly detailed algebraic equations, spiced with passing references to Aristotle and Marcuse. This, no doubt, leaves some readers to conclude, “This is obviously important because it is so hard to explain.” Continued...