“Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” —Leonardo da Vinci

I’ve always preferred Frankenstein’s Monster to the Mona Lisa. We’re often told to look to Leonardo da Vinci as the “patron saint” of genius, the man who could paint a masterpiece while dissecting a frog. But da Vinci, excellent as he was, represents an ideal of perfection that feels sterile in the modern age. I prefer the Monster because he represents the true nature of creativity. After all, he’s a literal amalgamation of dead things stitched together and zapped into life.

The core of interdisciplinary learning isn’t about being “well-rounded” or polite. It’s something more like grave-robbing. True genius doesn’t pop out of thin air; it emerges when you drag a concept from biology and stitch it onto a concept from poetry, creating something that shouldn’t exist. Acts of genius occur in finding connections between things that seem as unrelated as a tuxedo and flip-flops.

The Walled Gardens

Our modern education system is designed to combat this sort of genius. It wants us to pick a “major,” and many times, so many people waffle between two or three. It wants to place us in a silo, one where we become stored in until we’ve put ourselves in so much debt and giving up so much time to a system that hates us. Current “education” treats knowledge as a series of distinct, walled garden. History is here, Math is there, and never shall they meet. 

But I‘ve always been a sieve in those environments. I lose half of what I’m supposed to learn because I’m too busy looking for the jagged edges that connect the subjects together. For years, I thought this was a defect. But I’ve realized that being a sieve is not a bug; it is a filter. The rote memorization drains away, leaving only the gold nuggets that can be used to build something new.

Building Your Own Monster

I never wanted a liberal arts degree that costs a fortune, yet I wasted years of my life paying off the tens of thousands of dollars in debt I borrowed chasing one. I’ve always needed the freedom of a scavenger. I want to use my library card and my insatiable curiosity”to build my own monster. If you have those, it turns out, and you stop believing the “education” society is trying to sell you, then you don’t need anything else. You already have all the parts you need in the graveyard ready to go. 

Independent learning is not just a preference for me; it is a necessity. It allows me to ignore the artificial boundaries between disciplines. This is why I have always been a proponent of DIY education. The brochures for liberal arts colleges promise to mold students into Renaissance men and women. Of course, they don’t tell you that you don’t need to pay tuition to get that education.

Cramming facts into your brain isn’t the solution. Instead, we should be connecting the dots between things that seem like they belong in different universes. So, yes, da Vinci was right that everything does connect to everything else. But Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provided another important missing link. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dissecting frogs or painting masterpieces. Don’t try to be a perfect artist. Be a scientist of the strange. Use your curiosity to build your own monster.

~ Amelia Desertsong