Do we need a revival of the madrasa?

Many of the greatest contributions to science have been made by polymaths, people that mastered several areas of study. It is therefore unfortunate that today the polymath seems to have become an endangered species. In part this is simply because the total amount of knowledge today is much larger than say a thousand years ago, making it much harder to master multiple subjects. However, this is not the only reason the polymath has become endangered: our modern university system arguably plays a large role in this as well. 

    To understand this, we need to make a comparison with the medieval madrasa, a . In the program of such a madrasa, students would learn not just one subject, but would learn everything from language sciences, logic, mathematics, physics, and metaphysics

to ethics and politics. Contrast this with the university today! Here the average student chooses just one subject, spends three to four years studying that subject in a bachelor’s program, then specializes even further within that single subject in its master’s program, until a select group goes even further and spends several years studying a yet much smaller subject in a doctoral thesis. 

    From an economic perspective, this makes sense in our specialized capitalistic job market. However, one could also argue that one who has studied more than just one subject and has mastered several is a more complete human being in its own right. Furthermore, if we think critically about what approach would actually contribute most to our scientific knowledge, we might not necessarily conclude that the specialstic approach would be best. If we look at some of the people that have contributed most to science like Aristotle, Al-Farabi or Isaac Newton or even when we look at the few remaining homo universali in our time such as Noam Chomsky, it might suggest that interdisciplinary knowledge might be a better basis for progress than extreme specialization. This leaves one to wonder whether a return to a system more in line with the madrasa might not be such a bad idea after all.