This essay 1st appeared in my newsletter Unf^cking Education. Sign up here if interested in F’ing up the status quo and fixing education.
At the School of Entrepreneuring, we don’t have distinct subjects. I will break down why below.
If our schools were challenged to teach our kids how to ride a bike, they would:
- Study pedaling for a month
- Then adjust seat heights for a month
- Followed by practicing braking
- You’d then examine tire physics
- And finally, you’d learn about steering
There’d be rubrics and lesson plans and you’d do this all without ever actually riding a bike on an actual road.
Sounds ridiculous but welcome to our education system.
This is where isolated subjects are taught in disconnected blocks, removed from their real-world contexts and applications.
This approach to education isn’t just inefficient; it fundamentally misunderstands how humans learn and apply knowledge.
The division of knowledge into distinct “subjects” isn’t a cognitive necessity but a historical accident that has congealed into the most dangerous words in any system aka “that’s the way we’ve always done it”.
The result is that we actively hurts students and their learning.
As Harvard education professor David Perkins argues in his book “Making Learning Whole,” traditional education often teaches disconnected pieces without letting students experience the “whole game” of a field.
The Historical Accident of Subject Divisions
Our current educational model, with its rigid subject boundaries, originated in 19th century Prussia. It wasn’t designed to maximize learning or to create innovative thinkers.
It was designed to produce compliant workers and citizens for industrializing nations.
This system separated knowledge into discrete subjects taught at specific times because it mirrored the industrial workplace where workers performed specialized, repetitive tasks on schedule.
Students learned to move when the bell rang, to focus on assigned tasks regardless of interest or relevance, and to respect arbitrary divisions of work and time. The subject-based approach trained students to accept fragmentation and decontextualization which are precisely the skills needed for factory workers who would spend their days performing disconnected tasks without understanding the whole process or questioning the system itself.
By compartmentalizing knowledge, schools effectively trained students not to make connections or ask broader questions that would result in true understanding or which might challenge existing structures.
- Science was separated from math
- History was separated from literature
- Art was separated from computers/tech
Subject divisions weren’t just organizational tools but control mechanisms that shaped compliant minds accustomed to working within established boundaries rather than crossing them.
It wasn’t always this way.
Knowledge wasn’t always divvied up in the way we now take for granted.
Medieval scholars moved fluidly between what we now call astronomy, theology, mathematics, and medicine. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t distinguish between his anatomical studies and his painting. There were just part of the same inquiry into the nature of reality.
But what began as a deliberate model for industrial work, i.e., training future factory workers through the very structure of education, eventually became viewed as a requirement.
We started to believe that the mind itself was organized into subject-shaped compartments, and that learning necessarily followed these artificial divisions.
We started requiring aspiring teachers to specialize in subjects further reinforcing the model. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that questioning it seems almost nonsensical: “But how else would you organize a school?”
How the Brain Actually Learns: The Case for Integration
Cognitive science has consistently shown that knowledge is organized in our brains as interconnected networks, not isolated compartments. Learning occurs most effectively when new information connects to existing knowledge and when it’s applied in meaningful contexts.
David Perkins, author of Making Learning Whole calls this “playing the whole game at the junior level.” Rather than breaking learning into non-integrated pieces, he advocates for creating simplified but complete versions of real-world practices.
In Perkins view, a junior version still has the essential elements and purpose of the actual activity.
So in baseball, children learn by playing T-ball which is just a simplified version that still contains the fundamental elements of the game.
One common but handwavy defense of subject-based education is that it teaches students “how to learn,” even if the specific content is forgotten (as typically happens right after the exam). But genuine metacognition (understanding how one learns) emerges from seeing how knowledge transfers between contexts and understanding why certain approaches succeed or fail.
This rarely happens when knowledge is compartmentalized.
Think for a second about how much biology, chemistry, history, Spanish or history you’ve retained from high school.
For most people, their high school biology recollection is “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”.
In other words, they remember “very little”.
This is not because they weren’t intelligent or motivated, but because the isolated way this knowledge was presented failed to integrate with their mental models or real-world experiences.
This why most of us leave school with a trivia brain:
- The aforementioned “Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”.
- a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared
- Igneous rocks come from volcanoes.
- Shakespeare wrote Macbeth.
We remember fragments, not frameworks.
It’s only natural given we were trained to store facts, not to use them.
Without meaningful connections or authentic application, our brains simply don’t encode information as essential or relevant.
At the School of Entrepreneuring, we create this relevance via our Challenge-based learning model. Rather than organizing education around subjects, we structure learning around multidisciplinary Challenges which can be <1 month (sprints), 1-3 months (epics), 3-6 months (quests) and missions (6+ months). These real-world challenges naturally integrate multiple skills and knowledge areas.
For example, we have a “Business Detective Challenge” which exemplifies this approach.
Instead of learning spreadsheets in “computer class” and percentages in “math class” and writing in “English class”, students must convince and then partner with a local business to build a financial model that will help the business predict performance.
What makes this approach transformative is how it naturally integrates multiple domains:
- Students apply algebra to create predictive models
- They work with percentages and ratios to analyze business performance
- They develop communication and presentation skills when interviewing business owners
- They practice professional writing when documenting their findings
- They build research skills by studying market & competitive conditions
- They also cultivate “foundational competencies” like public speaking, sales, resilience and critical thinking
This helps students understand how their thinking works, why their predictions succeed or fail, and how to improve over time based on real feedback from a business owner, their peers, or their coach. They’re not just memorizing formulas or steps and mindlessly applying them on a test. They’re learning why certain approaches work in certain situations and how to adjust when things change.
That’s what “learning how to learn” really means: figuring things out through real, meaningful work and not through abstract lessons about thinking.
When we artificially separate biology from math or history from literature, we’re actually working against the brain’s natural learning processes. We force students to build mental walls between concepts that should naturally interconnect, then wonder why they struggle to transfer knowledge between contexts.
The False Efficiency of Subject Divisions
Another defense of subject-based education is that it’s more efficient to teach concepts in isolation, free from the “distractions” of real-world complexity. This fundamentally misunderstands efficiency in learning. More importantly, this has nothing to do with what is good for students. It’s a view that actually puts the teachers at the center of education – not students.
True efficiency isn’t about how quickly information can be transmitted.
It’s about how effectively it’s integrated into usable knowledge. When students must independently reconstruct connections between isolated concepts, much of what’s “efficiently” taught is lost in the transfer.
The Transfer Problem: Education’s Dirty Secret
The most damning evidence against subject-based education may be what researchers call the “transfer problem.” Decades of research has consistently demonstrated that knowledge acquired in one context rarely transfers to new situations without explicit bridging, a phenomenon thoroughly documented by researchers like Daniel Willingham and Robert Bjork.
In fact, a comprehensive review by researchers Detterman and Sternberg found that “transfer has been one of educational psychology’s most enduring problems” with spontaneous transfer being “rare to the point of being nonexistent.”
This research exposes a fundamental flaw in traditional education’s structure: subject-based learning assumes that students will naturally apply knowledge from math class to science class, or from English to history.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows they don’t.
Bryan Caplan, in “The Case Against Education,” notes that most students forget the majority of subject content shortly after final exams, suggesting that the elaborate machinery of subject-based education largely produces temporary knowledge optimized for testing rather than lasting understanding.
This phenomenon explains why so many students struggle to apply algebra to physics problems or to connect historical events to current political realities. Subject divisions create artificial barriers that the brain must overcome, often unsuccessfully, to construct usable knowledge.
What appears efficient in covering more concepts per hour is actually highly inefficient when measured by what students retain and can apply. The seeming “detours” into real application aren’t inefficiencies but essential pathways that build the neural connections required for true understanding. Knowledge taught in the context where it will be used eliminates the transfer problem entirely, creating direct pathways between concepts rather than requiring students to build bridges between isolated islands of information.
Research by education scholar Robert Haskell identifies at least 11 distinct levels of transfer, with the highest levels (applying knowledge across domains to solve novel problems) being precisely what employers and society value most.
And these are the levels most poorly served by subject-based instruction.
The evidence suggests that the “efficiency” of subject-based education is largely fictional. It is efficient at teaching knowledge won’t transfer, won’t stick, and ultimately won’t serve students in their lives and careers.
Real-World Evidence for Multidisciplinary Learning
On the other hand, the evidence for integrated, multidisciplinary learning extends beyond cognitive science. For over a century, educational approaches that break down subject boundaries have demonstrated superior results in engagement, retention, and transfer ability.
Maria Montessori’s “Cosmic Education” stands as one of the most enduring and successful models of integrated learning. Rather than dividing knowledge into subjects, Montessori presented children with what she called “the great stories” which are narratives about:
- the origin of the universe
- the development of life on Earth
- the emergence of humans; and
- the development of language and mathematics
These stories provided a framework that naturally integrated astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, history, language and math.
This approach wasn’t just philosophically appealing but produced measurable results.
Longitudinal studies of Montessori education consistently show stronger outcomes in both academic achievement and non-cognitive skills. A 2017 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that Montessori students demonstrated significantly better academic achievement, social understanding, mastery orientation, and enjoyment of academic work compared to peers in conventional schools.
The power of Montessori’s approach lies in how it respects the integrated nature of knowledge and the human mind. Learning occurs within meaningful contexts that connect to children’s natural curiosity about the world. Mathematics isn’t studied as an isolated set of procedures but as a language that helps us understand patterns in nature. Biology isn’t memorized terminology but exploration of the interdependent web of life that sustains our planet.
This echoes the findings of contemporary cognitive science which has shown that information learned in meaningful, integrated contexts creates richer neural networks and more durable understanding. The brain doesn’t compartmentalize knowledge; neither should our educational approaches.
While Montessori’s approach has primarily been studied in early childhood settings, research on integrated learning for adolescents shows similarly promising results. A 2019 study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that high school students who participated in project-based learning that integrated science, mathematics, and language arts demonstrated significantly better conceptual understanding and retention of content compared to students in traditional subject-based classrooms.
Research from Lucas Education Research found that students in integrated, project-based high school courses outperformed peers in traditional classes on AP exams and demonstrated stronger problem-solving abilities. Importantly, these benefits were consistent across socioeconomic backgrounds and prior achievement levels.
The long-term impact of integrated education is perhaps most compelling. A longitudinal study following students from integrated high school programs found they were more likely to persist in college STEM majors and reported higher career satisfaction in their twenties. These students cited their experience in making connections across disciplines as crucial to their professional success and personal fulfillment.
Practical Pathways to Integration
Moving away from subject-based education doesn’t mean abandoning rigor or comprehensive knowledge development. It means restructuring how we organize learning to align with how the brain actually works and how knowledge is actually used.
This could take several forms:
- Challenge-based learning: The School of Entrepreneuring organizes learning around Challenges that integrates multiple skills and knowledge areas around meaningful problems.
- Problem-based learning: Organizing curriculum around complex, authentic problems that naturally require multiple disciplines to solve.
- Thematic learning: Structuring learning around broad themes or questions that cut across traditional subject boundaries.
The common thread is that knowledge is organized by its use and application, not by historical academic divisions.
The Vision: Education Beyond Subjects
Imagine a school where a student investigates the history of epidemics not as an isolated history lesson, but as part of understanding how diseases spread, how societies respond, how mathematical models predict transmission, and how effective communication can save lives.
Imagine a learning environment where calculating percentages isn’t an abstract exercise, but a tool for understanding business finance, population growth, or environmental change.
This isn’t a radical vision
It’s simply education aligned with how humans naturally learn and how knowledge is actually used in the world. The real radicalism is our current system, which continually fights against the brain’s natural learning processes in service of administrative convenience.
The subject-based model of education is not just a historical artifact but the perpetuation of a deliberate system designed to produce compliant workers through its very structure. It’s time we stopped forcing the complex, interconnected process of learning into artificial boxes.
Our students deserve an education built around how humans actually learn and how knowledge is actually used and not one designed to reproduce the fragmented, specialized, and compliant mindset of factory labor.
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