In 2014, CICD will start yet another programme in partnership with One World University in Mozambique: the OWU Licentiate Degree course in Polyhistory.

This degree course lasts three years and is leading to what corresponds to a Bachelor of Arts degree.

The faculty of Polyhistory with its curriculum has recently been approved by the Gov­ernment of Mozambique, and is the only one of its kind in the world. So when enrolling for this 36-month programme, you will be partaking in a pioneer endeavour, the details of which are, at the time of writing, still under development.

The traditional polyhistor

Polyhistor is a word of Greek origin. Poly means “very” or “many”. “Histor” means wisdom or knowledge acquired through inquiry. A polyhistor thus means a person of great wisdom, a person with knowledge in many fields.

In early Renaissance Europe, learning was highly praised. One of the most famous polyhistors of all time was the Italian Leonardo da Vinci, who lived around 1500. His paintings, sculptures and architecture are among the most outstanding ever created. He researched a multitude of fields and invented new technologies.

Times changed.....

There were simply too many books to read. No one person could any longer be well versed in all the known literature.

Over time the number of fields grew, and today a researcher may specialise in the mo­lecular structure of certain composite materials or a similar narrow field. The results of this movement away from the old polyhistor tradition into a new tradition of extreme specialisation have been astonishing. The knowledge and understanding of the world we live in have become extremely detailed.

This is a good thing, but the development has not been without problems.

Specialists have often isolated themselves from the real world in academic ivory towers, removed from any social responsibility of their academic endeavours.

The modern polyhistor

We define a modern day polyhistor as someone who knows something about almost everything.

This, we claim, has become possible with the rapid development of technologies for handling and processing information: computers, the Internet, images from around the world, the large number of scientific magazines and scholarly books published, as well as the prominence of world languages, such as Portuguese and English, as mediums for accessing information and knowledge of almost any field and any issue under the Sun.