Author: David Epstein
Publisher: Macmillan
Details: 352pages, £20
ISBN: 978-0735214484
The thrust of David Epstein’s Range is that society overvalues specialisation. While he concedes that there are examples of highly successful early specialisers, such as golf’s Tiger Woods, he argues that such individuals are exceptions and it is generalists who reach the top of the tree most often in most fields.
Epstein is a clear and unfussy writer. He uses entertaining examples from sport, science, business and the arts, giving the book an episodic feel. Each of his interviews and case studies emphasises the advantage of maintaining a broad range of interests, which makes it easier to see connections between seemingly disparate disciplines and fields.
Range suggests that, in a world in which information is more widely available than it has ever been, universities and schools should discourage early specialisation and teach young people how to manipulate and use information instead. In the second chapter, How the Wicked World Was Made, which is written around an interview with intelligence researcher Professor James Flynn, he goes as far as advocating a shift away from teaching traditional subjects at university and towards project work in which links between disciplines might be more obvious. Doing this, Epstein hopes, would not only benefit individuals but society in general, which would profit from higher levels of creativity, which often happens at the boundaries between disciplines rather than within disciplines themselves.
Range goes on to unpick the pitfalls of too much specialisation, emphasising mistakes made by experts too entrenched in their fields to see what might be obvious to an outsider free of engrained habits and modes of thought. The chapter Fooled by Expertise makes for particularly sobering reading, describing numerous examples of highly intelligent and learned people making staggering mistakes, failing to recognise them and sometimes doubling down all because their overly specialised narrow views made it impossible for them to see solutions not directly in their lines of sight.
In this compelling chapter, however, lie contradictions and unanswered questions.
Despite spending most of the book championing the virtues of a generalist approach, Epstein concedes that specialists are needed too, with Einstein himself used as a striking example. This makes his argument less radical than he presents it to be. While it is true that implementation is not always effective, the benefits of a broad, balanced education are fairly widely recognised, accounting for the wide-ranging content of most school timetables, the popularity of joint honours degrees and the enduring prestige of MBAs.
That said, many teachers (as Ofsted also now do) will share Epstein’s anxiety around early narrowing of curriculum. Primary teachers worry about the effects of an overemphasis on English and maths in Years 5 and 6, and many teachers in secondary schools feel uneasy about children dropping some subjects often as early as Year 8. Fewer teachers will be convinced of the need to make fundamental structural changes, given that children in most English schools will have at least eight subjects on their timetables.
A second issue is that many of the examples of successful generalists found in in the book might better be described as experts in discrete fields who maintain interests in others. In the chapter The Outsider Advantage, Epstein describes examples of problems solved by people working outside the discipline within which the problem originated. Each of these solutions - from Parisian confectioner Nicholas Appert, who worked out how to preserve food for Napoleon’s army, to chemist John Davis who worked out how to clean up oil from the Exxon Valdez tanker - was discovered not by generalists with only shallow knowledge across a broad spectrum, but by an expert in one field applying deep knowledge in another.
Range doesn’t go as far as making specific policy recommendations for schools (it isn’t that sort of book), so it’s impossible to know what exactly Epstein thinks schools should do. It may be that what he really means is that young people should not decide what they want to be while they are at school and then work to achieve their ambition to the exclusion of everything else, and that no school should support such a narrow view of education. He may also mean that even once a person does achieve expertise in a field they should remain interested in and connected to others, staying humble enough to know that no level of knowledge offers immunity from making mistakes.
If this is indeed his message, then this book is likely to resonate strongly with most teachers. If, however, his argument is genuinely more extreme, and he thinks it necessary to entirely restructure educational landscapes in order to create a generation of generalist interconnected critical thinkers, then perhaps David Epstein really is being as controversial as he thinks he is.
Ben Newmark is vice-principal at Nuneaton Academy. He tweets @bennewmark
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