| The study of social science is more than the study
of the individual social sciences. Although it is tree that to be a good social
scientist you must know each of those components, you must also know how they
interrelate. By specializing too early, many social scientists can lose sight of
the interrelationships that are so essential to understanding modem problems.
That's why it is necessary to have a course covering all the social sciences. In
fact, it would not surprise me if one day a news story, such as the one above
should appear. The preceding passage placed you in the future. To understand how and when social science broke up, you must go into the past. Imagine for a moment that you're a student in 1062, in the Italian city of Bologna, site of one of the first major universities in the western world. The university has no buildings. It consists merely of a few professors and students. There is no tuition fee. At the end of a professor's lecture, if you like it, you pay. And if you don't like it, the professor finds himself without students and without money. If we go back still earlier, say to Greece in the sixth century B. C. , we can see the philosopher Socrates walking around the streets of Athens, arguing with his companions. He asks them questions, and then other questions, leading these people to reason the way he wants them to reason (this became known as the Socratic method). Times have changed since then; universities sprang up throughout the world and created colleges within the universities. Oxford, one of the first universities, now has thirty colleges associated with it, and the development and formalization of educational institutions has changed the roles of both students and faeuhy. As knowledge accumulated, it became more and more difficult for one person to learn, let alone retain it all. In the sixteenth century one could still aspire to know all there was to know, and the definition of the Renaissance man (people were even more sexist then than they are now) was of one who was expected to know about everything. Unfortunately, at least for someone who wants to know everything, the amount of information continues to grow {{U}}exponentially{{/U}} while the size of the brain has grown only slightly. The way to deal with the problem is not to try to know everything about everything. Today we must specialize. That is why social science separated from the natural sciences and why it, in turn, has been broken down into various subfields, such as anthropology and sociology. |