Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Teaching

When I was in school, teachers didn't generally cross over their line into another teacher's subject matter. No one wanted to step on anyone else's toes. It is nice of them to be so polite to one another but what about the detriment to the students. Learning is not meant to be a one subject at a time process, so why do some teachers treat it as such?
In the classroom, I think taking a cross-disciplinary approach to learning can be such an asset and can make learning more interesting for the student as well. If you are teaching a work of literature and you have a student who hates to read, you will have difficulty engaging that student in a meaningful way. However, if you integrate history, sociology, psychology, etc. you have a much better chance of hitting upon something a student is really interested in.
English is the perfect subject to use a cross-disciplinary approach with. Though most teacher do lightly hit upon the historical time a work was written in, this could be the topic of major discussion in the classroom. Students should learn about the author's life and how it might have influenced his or her writing, they should learn about the time period it was written in, the time period the story was set in, what was going on in the world, and so much more. First of all, it can really reveal why a work was written a certain way or why the author chose a particular subject. Reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" with no real knowledge of the time period is much different than reading it after learning extensively about the conditions of the South in the 1930s. You can get so much more out of a work if you can put it in context.
A subject I have always been interested in but didn't see outside of the particular classroom is psychology. I took psychology in high school and it consisted of memorizing terms and spitting them back out onto a test. Why weren't we applying some of what we were learning in English class. I think you can tell a lot about an author's personality and thoughts when you read about them. Not only that but you can also apply it to the characters in the book. This is something I have had numerous college professors do but I wish my high school teachers would have given me an earlier start.
Learning is certainly not a one-track art. If we have a problem, we typically don't just look at it from one aspects; we examine all perspectives of it. It is important to to teach students to look at something using all their knowledge, not just a specific part. Though it is called "English" class, it can be a class that transcends all subject matter and merely translates to "learning" class. We shouldn't expect out students to learn subjects individually, room by room. That is not the way they will be presented with problems and come up with solutions in life.