"In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles."
Maria Popova
One important mark of an educated person is the ability to see connections between more and more things. This is the root of an interdisciplinary education - presenting and teaching students to recognize connections. Though school is too often presented exclusively in distinct and separate compartments (English, math, history, etc.), the world around us is not.
From the earliest grades, we train our students to see connections between the various disciplines (e.g. between literature, history and art but also between science, mathematics, and the humanities) and challenge them to be better thinkers so they are more prepared for the world that awaits. We show students how to compare the ways of thinking in each discipline to determine how they are similar and how are they different.
This approach dovetails with a Christian worldview, which sees a single Creator behind every aspect of the creation—we should expect to see connections and an integrity to all that we study. All truth could be fitted together and the connections made explicit. In fact, the original idea of a university was founded on this Christian worldview of the created order. The fragmentation of the university today is a casualty of the decline of that world view in our culture.
The interdisciplinary nature of our curriculum begins with the Core Knowledge framework in the Lower School. It is capped off in the High School with yearly "Capstone Projects" that intentionally connect History and Literature.