One of Heinlein's more famous quotes is: "“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, wr

One of Heinlein's more famous quotes is: "“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”" Now, most of the specifics here are things that normal people could do (cook a meal, etc). Few of them ("plan an invasion") are something that require substantial training. But his point is that people should be well-rounded, not specialized. The problem is, generalization isn't rewarded in any modern culture that I'm aware of. The phrase "age of the specialist" is well known; people who are fantastic experts at (neurosurgery|IP law|graphics coding|etc) and utterly incompetent outside their field of expertise always have higher status and salaries than JOATs who can turn their hand to anything and do a decent job, but don't have great mastery at any one thing. It's even hard to argue which approach is better; who is more likely to make a significant new discovery, the scientist who knows every little detail of his entire field and can synthesize all of them, or the scientist with decent familiarity with half a dozen fields, that has bring a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem? I suppose there's a place for both. Certainly, when you have a knee surgery done, the guy you want to go to is the one who does nothing but knees, 4-8 operations per week, and not the guy who does whatever kind of surgery comes into his OR.