Specialists who can’t talk to each other aren’t a coincidence of modern knowledge. They’re its design.
A person raised inside a compartmentalised education system ends up holding separate, non-communicating accounts of reality — one for the science classroom, one for religious instruction, one absorbed from media — with no framework connecting them and no expectation that they should. The confusion this produces gets treated as a personal failing rather than what it actually is: the predictable output of a system built without an integrating layer.
The most cited diagnosis of this split is C.P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture “The Two Cultures,” which argued that scientific and literary-humanistic education had split into two camps unable to communicate even in the vocabulary of basic science — a divide Snow considered a genuine practical danger to solving real problems, not just an academic curiosity.
Source: Snow, C.P. (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press.