No field of study can advance significantly unless it incorporates knowledge and experience from outside that field.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the posit

Education is certainly the hot-button issue of the moment, with national policies such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind changing how pedagogical practices are implemented, academic success is measured, and learning arises. At the heart of the debate over the future of the education is the question broached in the prompt: whether a given academic field or discipline should collaborate and form synergy with other realms of knowledge in order for advancement of the field? Many orthodox educators would vehemently decry the intermingling of disparate professions inasmuch as they regard as sacrosanct the body of knowledge that their own respective fields have accumulated over thousands of years. Besides, the extreme opposites on the spectrum of human knowledge, such as humanities and science, seem irreconcilable with each other. Granted, how could the study of American Literature benefit from a closer scrutiny of Molecular Biology? Yet, as human civilization advances and progresses exponentially, the knowledge and the skills required to better our society have become more and more profound and sophisticated, a hallmark that galvanizes a field to break the boundary via which it used to define its realm. Overall, I subscribe to the core spirit of the prompt that a field can advance significantly should it adopt the knowledge and experience from outside that field.
Ever since the Scientific Revolution after the medieval age, conventional approaches to scientific research led many scientific fields into a stage of stagnancy, where a plateau had been reached, and breakthroughs in human knowledge seemed to be a luxury. Take linguistics in the 1970s. Noam Chomsky’s sensational yet widely-hailed model of Generative Grammar repudiated the then-prevailing model of language acquisition, the Behaviorism, and had landed itself as the zenith of linguistics theory and language acquisition. What befuddled, from a retrospective point of view, many linguists and scientists is that no other monumental breakthroughs in linguistics were ever made after Chomsky’s Generative Grammar. It appeared to many that the field of linguistics had been exhausted and the field had found itself rehashing the old paradigms and regurgitating anything but innovative. However, such a claim is conspicuously erroneous from a contemporary perspective since it does not take one too far to pinpoint a cascade of exemplar scientific breakthroughs in the recent human development that can be ascribed to the exploitation of experience and knowledge outside a given field.
Take Systemic Functional Grammar by Michael Halliday. Recognizing the semiotic functions of languages and fluid attributes of languages due to contextual clues, Halliday in 2001 audaciously proposed that languages are more than just an inborn faculty that resides in human’s brains, as Chomsky’s Generative Grammar would have predicted. Languages should be treated as a multidimensional network of human experiences and human interrelations, via which humans capitalize on languages to mediate their relations with interlocutors and carry out conversations and other forms of verbal communications. In Halliday’s case, the recourse to incorporating semiotics has propelled linguists to explore more possibilities of studying languages. This trend, however, does not end here. The social functions of languages have therefore caught up, with many linguists and researchers now probing into the interplay of language and many other social constructs, such as racial landscape, sexual orientation, or identity construction. Another pertinent example that substantiates the generalization is the wide applicability and application of almost every scientific field. Game Theory, devised by a distinguished yet recently demised mathematician John Nash, has colored many other fields, such as biology, economy, or social science. For instance, biologists have used Game Theory to foreshadow the deceptive behaviors among male frogs that might intentionally showcase lower voices to ward off their competitors, economists have drawn on Game Theory to design a mathematical model so as to adumbrate buyers’ buying behaviors, and social scientists studying human conversations have taken advantage of Game Theory and conversation analysis to pattern out sequences of human conversations. Different disciplines have witnessed the impregnable force of acting synergistically with outside fields, accordingly.
With the merits of fields incorporating with outside fields, the “all-or-nothing” bisector that the prompt is couched under seems to be too absolute, if not inapt. In fact, there are still many fields that have advanced tremendously without them depending on the knowledge and experience from outside fields. Take linguistics again. Frederic G. Cassidy, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used the most traditional way of gleaning data, that is, interviewing informants and transcribing their speeches, to document regional dialects of American English. He and his assistants orchestrated a host of interview questions in order to be able to elicit the responses that they wanted and travelled to different parts of the country to record a host of dialectal features, such as soft drinks typically used in the North whereas coke in the South. With perseverance and sedulous spirits, Cassidy and his assistants were eventually able to compile Dictionary of American Regional English, the most comprehensive guideline that faithfully and objectively documents the variations of American English. This exemplifies the fact significant advancement is still plausible, even without a field applying techniques of other fields.
As one can discern, traditional methods may have assisted in improving science and advancing a field, but in the contemporary time, the rate of advancement might be slow if traditional methods are the only methods that people adopt. Instead, what really makes and marks scientific breakthrough is that a field incorporates the expertise, experience, and knowledge outside that field. Nonetheless, overly relying on outside fields and overlooking the merits of the original disciplines might backfire, defeating the purpose of scientific cooperation. What seems the best way is therefore that a field should ferrets out the merits and positive aspects of other disciplines while at the same time keeping on challenging the boundaries that a field has been delimited by. Such a balanced strategy would most likely maximizes the possibilities of knowledge advancement in current human society.