#96: The case for interdisciplinary education in a rapidly changing world
A Q&A with social scientist Dr Amelia Peterson
Hello!
We’re back to scheduled programming. (No other excuse other than busy times. It’s good to be back.)
This week’s Q&A guest is Dr Amelia Peterson, a social scientist with a background in education policy. Her research focuses on how education systems adapt to societal and economic change.
I’ve known Amelia since our undergraduate days and have referenced her work in Pass It On a number of times. One of the things I admire most about Amelia is her ability to reason and act through first principles. In 2020, after teaching Social Policy at the London School of Economics, Amelia became one of the founding faculty members of The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS)—a brand-new university on a mission to challenge the traditional paradigm of higher education. Instead of studying discrete subjects (like Classics or Biology), LIS students study complex problems from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives—building knowledge across the arts, science, and humanities. The argument being that students are better equipped to solve the world’s most important problems.
I asked Amelia to share the LIS founding story and her views on the role of education in an AI-augmented world. Her answers do not disappoint.
What problem is the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) trying to solve? How does it differ from traditional higher education?
LIS was created to bridge several kinds of gaps in higher education: between 'academia' and industry, between the arts and sciences, and between those who are set on a trajectory towards university and those who aren't. We are a hybrid institution that embodies parts of all those different cultures: those who come to visit could find a ground floor that feels like a typical messy start-up, then a philosophy seminar going on upstairs, a data science class above that, and an art studio in the basement, with the student common room sandwiched between, where the wall is covered in a big map of where all the students come from. It's a pretty special community right now.
What made you realise that higher education needed to change?
I think many academics feel torn between the demands of research and teaching. The incentives in higher education are still very much loaded towards research, which means that even when individual academics are trying to innovate their teaching, it's hard to do anything on a collective level that would reform the overall student experience. I remember vividly being in a faculty meeting at one of my previous institutions where one faculty member was trying to do something different in their class that would require them to extend sessions by 30 minutes, and others were complaining that it would create a new expectation and students would start demanding more time from all of them. And they had a point—for many, higher education is now just a commodity where students measure and compare their experience in the number of taught hours. We need much more focus on what they're actually learning, the quality of the learning experience, and above all, the quality of the curriculum: what care has gone into choosing what they spend time doing and why.
In 2021, you took the concept of education back to first principles with your book Thrive: The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World. One year later, ChatGPT arrived. Has the technology increased your conviction in your thesis?
My co-author Valerie Hannon and I wrote Thrive because we realized that too many policy conversations about education centred on the how and what instead of the why. There was a lot of discussion about “21st-century skills” and how to use technology to improve student outcomes, but very little was being said about why we should focus on certain outcomes instead of others. To counter this trend, Thrive outlined a set of purposes for education that are grounded in an analysis of what we as individuals, communities, and a planet need to live flourishing lives.
These questions about purpose have only become more pressing with developments in AI. We had been saying for a long time that the problem with standardised testing is that computers will become better at the tests than we are, and that's exactly what has happened. Yet it seems the primary use of AI in education is to help students pass those same tests. I can understand that—that's the orientation of our education system at the moment—but I would be interested to hear from any tech companies focused on changing that orientation. I’m also interested in how we might use technologies to support different purposes of education. There's some interesting work going on in the assessment space, but still a huge amount to be done there.
Increasingly, I think there is a saturation point where the role of education is to preserve a space separate from AI: I want to ensure that students learn to use their own minds, hearts, and hands independently of these tools.
When it comes to AI, what are the greatest risks and opportunities institutions like LIS are grappling with right now?
There's clearly a huge opportunity for students to enhance their powers of analysis and creation by using AI tools. As a relatively new institution, it's been relatively easy to fold these tools into the curriculum and give students practice with them. But there is a considerable risk in students becoming reliant on tools that predominantly now require a monthly payment, that will never be 100% accurate or verifiable, that may suddenly disappear due to legal or technical challenges, and the use of which is ethically questionable given the way they use prior human work and huge amounts of energy.
I go back and forth on where the greatest risk lies—promoting their use too much or not enough—but increasingly, I think there is a saturation point where the role of education is to preserve a space separate from AI: I want to ensure that students learn to use their own minds, hearts, and hands independently of these tools. I would still encourage any young person to understand them, however, and I'm glad all our students learn about how LLMs work and study the ethics of AI as compulsory parts of the programme.
Does AI increase the importance of interdisciplinary thinking? Why?
AI increases the importance of any kind of thinking, particularly—obviously—critical thinking, since we all have to become better at spotting when output has errors. This is where interdisciplinary (ID) thinking becomes even more important: it heightens your awareness of how knowledge is created across different fields, which makes you more equipped to identify different kinds of errors— not just factual but logical, aesthetic, and ethical. AI also may increase the value of an interdisciplinary education because it can extend and enhance skills, so someone with foundational training across photography, statistics, and design, for example, can use AI tools to produce higher-quality work in all those fields.
When we were at university, interdisciplinary studies were looked down upon, seen as less than. Why was that?
Anything interdisciplinary runs the risk of just being a watered-down version of disciplinary learning. It's easy to take insights or models from one field and apply them in another in a way that seems novel just because it's unfamiliar to the other field. At LIS, we say that interdisciplinary learning has to be problem- or purpose-driven because that's what 'disciplines' it: there has to be a driving reason for working out what subjects are relevant and how they have to come together, so then you can stand back and evaluate whether the integration has served its purpose.
What's been the most challenging thing about building a university from scratch? Has anything surprised you?
The most challenging thing about doing this in England is that the higher education sector lacks a financially sustainable model. LIS has prioritized teaching UK students, and our fees are set at the same level as most of the sector, in line with the student loan system, where the loan rate has not kept up with inflation. This is challenging for us but even more so for our students, who have to make ends meet living in London on their maintenance loans and topping that up with work while also studying. As a student, I worked during the holidays but not during term time, and that's not the reality for most students now. In that financial context, the ideal is for students to get meaningful work experience while supplementing their income: we've seen some of our students continue their paid summer internships into longer-term part-time jobs alongside their studies. I hope that's a model that might grow.
How will higher education in Britain look in 10 years from now?
It may continue to look different in Scotland from England and Wales due to the different funding models and devolved policy. In England and Wales, at least, we should expect greater diversity in the higher education system as more novel institutions start up. I hope the biggest change will be in the assessment system and how marks get aggregated into percentages and degree classifications. It's already widely acknowledged that firsts, seconds, etc., have become relatively meaningless with the differences across institutions, and there is a huge opportunity to increase the value of what higher education does by improving how we communicate what students have learned and what they can do. Higher education should be at the forefront of creating a genuine skills system with a real market for knowledge and skills, not just credentials. But that would take serious collective investment in assessment innovation and recognition that high-quality assessment is a public good. I would love to see some apprenticeship levy funding diverted towards that. But that's another project…
Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?
Currently, Nate Hagen's podcast The Great Simplification is keeping me thinking. It's extremely earnest, sometimes more than I can take, but I appreciate that call to take things seriously; Brits find it all too easy not to.
Going further back, Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity shaped how I see the world. His work, alongside many others in the American pragmatist tradition of philosophy, made me less interested in abstract questions of what's true and more interested in what it means for us and what we do.
Related to that, Nel Noddings' book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education probably had a lasting impact on what I value and see as true. Up to that point, I had had a very logic, analysis, and argument-based education, particularly in relation to philosophy. Noddings' book helped me unpick that and think about what else matters. I still think all those things matter, but it chipped open the space for other things to enter.
More questions for Amelia? Find her on LinkedIn or email amelia.peterson@lis.ac.uk. Bear in mind, she’s on maternity leave until January 2025!
Thanks so much for reading,
Lauren