Gardner Thoughts

After reading Gardner's thoughts on synthesis, I am a little cloudy. Gardner is very lofty with some of his word usage and I found myself having to read some passages more than once. However, I think that what he is trying to say is that people have to be taught how to synthesize. In almost any situation, people have to put many different facts together and then make a decision. Many could argue that this is synthesis. He talks about interdisciplinary ideas. He states that this idea actually starts when we are very young and that as time goes on we are taught to ignore some of those impulses. Young children try to force things together, to make correlations where there might not be any to make. When we enter school, we are taught facts and not necessarily how these facts intertwine with one another. Hitsory is separate from math is separate from English, etc. Every subject is its own discipline with its own set of facts to decipher and learn. I tend to agree with him. I was asking my students the other day who Shakespeare was. None of them knew who I was talking about. They didn't know who he was, what he did, or where he lived. It seems to me that might have come up somewhere along the line. How could Shakespeare not have come up in all the years that a 5th grader would have been in school? How can you even teach poetry, sonnets, early literature, etc without mentioning him? To go on, I asked what country he would have been from. They told me Mississippi, London, and Europe. Note that none of these are countries. I wonder if this would have happened in a more interdisciplinary classroom environment. I think students would learn more if they were given the opportunity to make more links from one subject to another. As a music teacher, we try to link things together all of the time. We link history, geography, science, etc to what we do because it is an integral part of what we do. How can we teach notes without teaching how those pitches are created? It seems to me that once again, musicians take the lead.