Synopsis - from the Greek words συν (syn = together) and οψις (opsis = seeing)

"Liberal education should give the student the sense that learning must and can be both synoptic and precise. For this, a very small, detailed problem can be the best way, if it is framed so as to open out on the whole. Unless the course has the specific intention to lead to the permanent questions, to make the student aware of them and give him some competience in the important works that treat of them, it tends to be a pleasant diversion and a dead end - because it has nothing to do with any program of further study he can image.

If such programs engage the best energies of the best people in the unviersity, they can be beneficial and provide some of the missing intellectual excitement for both professors and students.

...

To repeat, the crisis of liberal education is a reflection of a crisis at the peaks of learning, an incoherence and incompatibility among the first priniciples with which we interpret the world, an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization. But perhaps it would be true to say that the crisis consists not so much in this incoherence but in our incapacity to discuss or even recognize it. Liberal education flourished when it prepared the way for the discussion of a unified view of nature and man's place in it, which the best minds debated on the highest level. It decayed when what lay beyond it were only specialities, the premises of which do not lead to any such vision. The highest is the partial intellect; there is no synopsis."

The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom
1987

Caveat: This quotation is highly out of context as I just received this book today and have not read the whole thing. Nevertheless, it's something to chew on for now.