TOWARD INTERDISCIPLINARITY: 
APPROACHES TO THE DISCIPLINES FROM THE 1890s 

Kathleen Cruickshank 

with the increasing interest in 
interdisciplinary and integrated curriculum, 
techniques for assisting teachers and 
curriculum directors in approaching what is 
generally regarded as a new innovation have 
begun to proliferate. · On the whole, these 
approaches appear to be largely techniques, 
but neither this aspect nor the notion of 
interdisciplinary teaching is new. The 
purpose of this paper is to explore some of 
the theoretical work in interdisciplinary 
curriculum which was done a century ago and 
to stimulate thinking about 
interdisciplinary curriculum which moves 
beyond the purely technical. 

Until the second half of the 19th 
century, the dominant view of the academic 
subjects had been as a means toward 
disciplining the various faculties of the 
mind. Curriculum content was to be based 
upon a combination of disciplines which 
would ensure the harmonious development of 
the total mind, but the subjects were to be 
taught separately in order to best train 
each of the separate faculties. In the last 
decades of the century, several new 
approaches to curriculum appeared, in part 
to deal with the proliferation of new sub­
jects of study, in part as an antidote to 
heavily criticized rote teaching through 
which many students seemed incapable of 
substantive learning. 

The first systematic attempt to relate 
those parts into a coherent whole appears to 
have been that of William Torrey Harris, 
developed during his tenure in the St. Louis 
Public Schools in the 1860s and 1870s. The 
basics of elementary education he considered 
to be reading and writing, arithmetic, 
geography, history, and grammar. Reading 
was the key study, through which one "issues 
forth from the circumscribed life of the 
senses, 111 and which "emancipates the pupil 
from the thralldom of dependence on the 
spoken word," offering him "all that has 
been observed and comprehended in the world, 
and . . . all the wisdom that has been derived 
from human error and suffering. II' In an 1869 
article, he placed reading and literature at 
the center, from which the other branches 
were to branch out, but by 1888 Harris had 
formulated the "five windows of the soul" 
metaphor f o r which he would become known.' 
The unity of the Hegelian world-view served 
as his context, history being the account of 
the institutions man creates as a 
manifestation of the "essential and eternal 
in the human will, II and of IIhow men have 
attacked and defended their substantial will 
as embodied in those institutions. I" History 
was one of the five windows in the five­
sided "dark tower of ignorance II of 
illiterate man, the others being arithmetic, 

geography, grammar, and literature. 
Arithmetic opened the window of the soul 
toward the inorganic phase of nature, geog­
raphy toward the organic phase and its 
relations, IIfirst to the inorganic nature 
which it presupposes, and secondly, to the 
triple world of man above it, for whom it 
offers its service. II ' That triple world 
consisted of human will, intellect, and 
sensibility, viewed through history, 
grammar, and literature respectively. The 
purpose of education was to IIfit individuals 
for ... interchange of all with all, II that 
each might be "brought on the way toward 
comprehending the experience of his fellow­
men, and .. . rendered capable of lifting 
himself into a helpful relationship toward 
all. Ii' 

The key to the intellect for Harris 
was grammar, which revealed II the logical 
constitution of the mind. II' It was the 
introduction to psychology and all philos­
ophy, training the mind lito see its own 
processes, to make careful discriminations, 
to define logically, to layout work and 
arrange for division of labor,lI and, above 
all, cultivating directive power in the 
soul. II' Grammar also led to philology and 
connected as well with that language study 
which consisted of the II acquirement of 
higher vocabularies, " i . e. the special 
vocabularies used in literature and the 
other disciplines. In the focus on logic, 
grammar joined with history to create the 
social and political sciences in Harris' 
1869 formulati on, then out of their 
intersection with physical geography came 
the first principles of political economy. 
In 1888 he merely pointed to jurisprudence, 
sociology, politics, political economy, 
archaeology, and ethnology as emanating from 
history. Geography, which he had conceived 
in 1869 as providing the techniques for 
natural history through physical geography, 
was in 1888 more specifically the door to 
meteorology, astronomy, geology, botany, and 
zoology, the disciplinary descendants of 
natural history. Arithmetic developed into 
geometry and algebra, "natural philosophy, II 

and chemistry. Natural philosophy appeared 
in both the 1869 and 1888 versions, but in 
1869 Harris noted that it provided the 
techniques of the "quantitative or 
mathematical sciences of nature ll

- whereas 
natural history, emanating from physical 
geography, provided the techniques for the 
"qualitative branches of Natural Science. II " 

Thus the natural sciences appear at the 
intersection of mathematics and geography, 
as the social and political sciences appear 
at the intersection of grammar and history. 
Out of the political and social sciences in 
combination with physical geography comes