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Why America's Obsession With STEM Education Is Dangerous
HughPickens.com writes According to an op-ed by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post, if Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country's education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills, expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities. "It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher." But according to Zakaria the dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts — and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future.
As Steve Jobs once explained "it's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." Zakaria says that no matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write and cites Jeff Bezos' insistence that writing a memo that makes sense is an even more important skill to master. "Full sentences are harder to write," says Bezos. "They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking." "This doesn't in any way detract from the need for training in technology," concludes Zakaria, "but it does suggest that as we work with computers (which is really the future of all work), the most valuable skills will be the ones that are uniquely human, that computers cannot quite figure out — yet. And for those jobs, and that life, you could not do better than to follow your passion, engage with a breadth of material in both science and the humanities, and perhaps above all, study the human condition."
As Steve Jobs once explained "it's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." Zakaria says that no matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write and cites Jeff Bezos' insistence that writing a memo that makes sense is an even more important skill to master. "Full sentences are harder to write," says Bezos. "They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking." "This doesn't in any way detract from the need for training in technology," concludes Zakaria, "but it does suggest that as we work with computers (which is really the future of all work), the most valuable skills will be the ones that are uniquely human, that computers cannot quite figure out — yet. And for those jobs, and that life, you could not do better than to follow your passion, engage with a breadth of material in both science and the humanities, and perhaps above all, study the human condition."
That's about it.
Every field must be rendered to it's logical axioms in order to allow computers to perform every task. Tasks that cannot be computerized are obsolete and are to be re-designed for computer processing. Your so-called "human" skills are an impediment to this future and are thus required to be eliminated.
The push to expand STEM is the result of so many people in the past rushing toward humanities majors that we have a glut. I don't think people are trying to eliminate them, but just bring some balance back.
I am eager to see the kind of responses this headline is going to generate here, where STEM is the bread and butter of most of the userbase.
My daughter's ability to write and spell based on the lessons at school = fail. I have to retrain her. Often.
If you can master technical skills and complex math, overwhelming data suggests that you have also learned to read and think, and on the path to proving your competence have also managed to write clearly. I really don't think that's the loss. The best argument is creative losses from lacking a broad background in other cultures, ideas and in some cases lack of historical reference. It's not clear to me to what degree this really helps 99% of the STEM workforce though.
The only career I know of where being able to do any of these things is optional, seems to be upper level executives.
Two planets, one of which is populated by agrarian scholars, another high-tech. Which would Spock choose (WWSC)?
You only need only Steve Jobs to design the outside. You need thousands of engineers to build the hardware and write the code. The engineers don't need liberal arts background.
if Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country's education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills, expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities
I'm pretty sure that's far down on the list of convictions that people in the United States are united on. More like a fad that's popular in some circles.
Sound advice if you want to end up like the millions of others with over $20,000 in debt from their Liberal Arts degrees and can't find a job in their field.
That's what computers teach.
Like everything else in this country, people seem to have this pathological need to take things to extremes. The neglecting of STEM subjects in schools was a problem that needed to be fixed. In the past, we have given far too much credence to the notion that you can just study focused subject to the exclusion of all else and you'll be a success. Trouble is, we have too many people who studied nothing but transgender religious environmental studies and now they wonder why they can't get a job.
So naturally, the knee jerk reaction is to swing the pendulum all the way to STEM at the expense of a broad education. And that's just as bad.
Yes, we do need to increase the amount of STEM training we provide to our students. But only insofar as we eliminate the neglect those topics have suffered. And we cannot justify neglecting the other subjects. Having students understand the basic concepts in STEM fields is just as important as understanding the significance of the major events in history and understanding the basic classical themes in literature, not to mention the need to know how to communicate effectively in speech as well as in writing. They are all pieces in a greater whole. Neglecting any of the pieces reduces the whole.
Anyone who believes that STEM education is purely about learning equations and diagrams does not get it.
STEM is about organizing ones thoughts for clarity, something "humanities" strives to do, and in trying, often misses the mark by a wide berth.
Science is about creating a hypothesis, devising a sensible test, and understanding the results fully, in complete context.
Technology is about organizing complex systems, the attributes of each piece, their interrelations, and understanding how to modify and improve the overall system. Whether it is a mechanical machine, a computer network, or a community of people, studying technology is studying organization. This is the same goal as sociology, but done better.
Math is about taking a complex problem, reducing it into component pieces, addressing each one properly, and combining the individual results back into an overarching conclusion, just as a well written essay would do.
The best engineers are humanities students. Not because they also took liberal arts classes in college, but because they understand that Engineering is far more than solving math problems.
I think the real problem is not the number of people getting a generalized liberal arts degree vs the number of people getting a STEM degree.
Both of those degrees are expensive and worth it.
Nor is it the number of people getting what I will call the specialized non-stem degree.
Prime examples of this would be "Hotel Management", "Sociology", "Graphic Designer", "illustrator", "Teaching."
Note, this is not an insult to those fields. The world needs people with those skills. But if you want to be a teacher, get a BA in English or Mathematics, or Biology, not in teaching. My sister has a Masters in sociology - a well worth it. But as a College level degree, it is worthless. You can't get a job as a Sociology Major, nor does it help you get into a Masters Program more than a degree in Psychology. No on goes looking for a painter with an Illustrator degree, they look for a painter that paints WELL.
Some of these 4 year degrees would do much better as a 2 year program. Others should simply get a liberal arts 4 years BA and then get work or go into a post-grad study. Some should never go to college at all, better to get some real life experience.
The problem is that certain job fields have NO business getting a 4 year degree in that subject. There is reason to learn how to lift off an airplane if you don't also learn how to land it. Four year programs for certain things make no sense.
The problem is people have been caught up in the idea that a College education is the be all and end all. So we took a bunch of regular jobs that don't need or want a BA and created BA's for them. Some of them need Post-Grad work, others could get by on a couple of Community College courses, rather than spending the huge amount of money for a BA.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I suspect that the only reason America has an 'obsession' with getting STEM rates up is that huge amounts of marketing and rhetoric have gone into the idea that there is a STEM shortage and thus we need more H1-B visas, and those are attractive not due to shortage or skill, but because 'threat of deportation' can be factored into total compensation packages at the expense of pay and benefits.
Except for maybe hardcore nerds, I've noticed most people in STEM actually are very interested in Liberal Arts ( Literature, Music, Anthropology, History, Graphical Arts, ...) and enjoy experiencing and learning about it on their own time. Of those people who were into STEM in high-school, most achieved higher grades in the Liberal Arts courses given in high school than the so called liberal arts students.
Personally, I don't see Apple as a good example to follow.
If you ever write a six page memo, you're definitely not thinking clearly - you're a lunatic.
I started to read TFA, but it started to ramble and loose focus. Something, blah, blah, critical thinking, something, something, poor standing on international tests in the STEM fields – it seems to whiplash back and forth contradicting itself.
Teaching is hard. Sure education needs to be well rounded.
That said, STEM will be more and more important going forward for the majority wanting a good paying job. Guess that sucks for the humanities majors. Life’s not fair sometimes. I suspect we can put an emphasis on STEM, give them a well rounded education that includes some humanities, like, oh I don’t know, like EVERY Bachelor of Science degree I know of. I doubt very much our nation will suffer a lack of critically needed non-STEM majors. From what I hear non-STEM fields have stagnant wages – so de-emphasizing them should increase wages for those that really wish to peruse these as their passion.
Letter To Iran
This is why I think it's important for STEM majors to go to a liberal arts school. A school that forces you to do a number of credits from different faculties and will force you to take courses in the social 'sciences,' arts, literature, history philosophy, religion, anthropology, etc. I would also agree with the comments on writing. Too often these days I run into people who cannot compose a cogent email let alone a memo or document. While technical skills are very important, leadership and communications skills are key differentiators in any business.
Yes, this country needs more kids studying the sciences, and going into science and engineering-related fields. However, just as important (if not moreso) is the ability to critically think -- something that has been typically emphasized in a traditional liberal arts / humanities-centric education. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater by "de-emphasizing the humanities" here, or else you'll end up with a nation of code jockeys who make shitty decisions and can't think for themselves.
An obsession with "humanities" is just as dangerous as the one with engineering.
But the one obsession to rule them all is that with idea, that the government needs to step in and ensure everybody is doing, what the government (currently) considers best. It not only robs the citizens of freedom to decide for ourselves and our children, it also leads to danger and lost lives.
Consider the earlier change of government's doctrine to the exact opposite direction: for decades fat used to be bad for you, but not any more — now it the sugar, that's evil — how do they tell the last dying diabetic, it was all a mistake?
We are now collectively executing a similar pivot from "humanities" to engineering, for better or worse. But the underlying assumption remains: were it not for the omniscient and benevolent government officials, the adorable (mostly) individual slobs they've got for citizenry wouldn't learn or do anything to improve their own lot themselves.
Can we get rid of this obsession, please? Then we wouldn't need to worry about the others so much...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This STEM stuff is almost comical , the best absolute "programmers" are classically trained musicians who read music and are good at math
so put a musical instrument in your kids hand, teach then to read, count and let them go out and play in the sunshine, the rest will follow. the absolute worst thing you could do is put them in front of a computer screen and turn into the walking dead
Was this a Fareed original, or yet another of his pieces of plagiarism?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
But unless we stop trying to kill manufacturing in this country and make certain there is the framework to provide jobs, we might as well just throw the effort away.
Without the jobs that demand it, you might as well create a generation that has enhanced student debt.
also scientists and any other stem field
You'd think if we had a STEM shortage, wages would skyrocket. The fact that they aren't indicates that we have no shortage.
He's pretending someone wants to just up and replace all schooling with STEM-only classes. The idea is preposterous, nobody sane or halfway intelligent thinks that's possible or will happen.
Seems like a "I need something to write about, I'll make up a fake issue" article.
I find that a lot of the open-source software/frameworks that I use seem to be written in North America and Europe, where there still seems to be a focus on broader education than STEM-obsessed India and China. In my experience, the people with new and interesting ideas are often people who have a wide variety of knowledge that they can drawn on.
Specializing to the point of shunning other fields is the domain of technicians. There's nothing wrong with being a technician, but generally they are not the ones driving innovation.
From the linked piece...
And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.
When I travel especially in Asia, (read China, South Korea, Singapore etc), I find better employment of technology than in USA right from the airport! This technology isn't necessarily American at all!
What I find we Americans have, is the view that we are at the epitome of the best. You can't compare the subway system in NY to that in Shanghai in terms of deployed tech for example! NY is in the dark ages. I know because engineers from NY go to Shanghai to "learn" how things are done on such scale.
The Koreans have come to dominate ship building not using western tech, but their home grown solutions to enormous problems.
What I find is that we in America are really one confident lot, right from school kids. We also have a spirit of "self congratulation." But trust me, those Asian folks beat us in many ways.
Great engineering or science is art. If you look at the evolution of bridges they have become more and more beautiful as newer technologies have been developed and applied. Where bridges tend to be ugly is when the engineering is old school and workman like.
Also it tends to be the muddy thinking of the humanities that can drive horrible disasters of thinking. Things like trickle down economics had pretty much zero real math behind it. Plus many of the worst dictators in history had humanities and/or arts educations along with many of their worst henchmen. Things like the scientific method are critical to great political policy making, not law degrees where rhetoric and finding a misplaced comma in a written law lets your serial killer client skate on the charges.
Often when horrible things happen and science gets blamed it is actually an artistic interpretation of science at the source. Eugenics would be a perfect example of simpletons applying their interpretation of science.
A great example of this sort of crap would be how religious people are trying to drive intelligent design into the education system through a terrible interpretation of how science works.
I have zero problem with having someone with a hard core arts degree have some input on the building of a bridge in things like choosing he colours or picking from a group of equal designs, but I really really don't want them designing he whole thing and then having the engineers find a kludge that might keep it from falling down.
But where this guy really falls down along with many STEM pushing policy makers is that while it would be nice for the average school kid to have a better grasp of the physical world around them what is sorely lacking is a place for kids who can excel at science to thrive. A great example would be my daughter's high school. They have science requirements to graduate; fine. But in a 1,200 kid school there is no science fair this year; yet the school budgeted $50,000 for a football team that generates zero revenue.
What it boils down to are two things. Take all the art out of your life and see how you are living. Now take all the technology out of your life and see how that goes. One interesting factoid is that most people access their art through technology anyway and the art is often massively reliant upon technology for its generation.
STEM is not an either or with art. But art is largely a not without STEM. STEM is the difference between the third world and the first. I think that much of the anti STEM sentiment comes from those jealous that in most cases the arts alone leave you in the economic dust either as a person and especially as a country.
Except for maybe hardcore nerds, I've noticed most people in STEM actually are very interested in Liberal Arts ( Literature, Music, Anthropology, History, Graphical Arts, ...) and enjoy experiencing and learning about it on their own time. Of those people who were into STEM in high-school, most achieved higher grades in the Liberal Arts courses given in high school than the so called liberal arts students.
I am one of those people. I absolutely hated the required dumbed-down intro liberal arts classes, but on my own time, I find myself wanting to pick up history books or dabble further in languages more than the 101 level here and there. I found that many of my peers in the math and sciences had some similar part of the liberal arts they were interested in.
Many liberal arts students like to read up on science too. They unfortunately read the pop-sci books that are not always very good (I found myself fielding questions from friends regarding 11-dimensions and quantum theory that didn't make a whole lot of sense, for example), but I think they were interested too. Again, when they could dabble on their own, and not be forced to take a boring intro class.
We need to trust that people in college deserve to be there and are smart enough to make their own decisions (particularly when knowledgeable professors are around for guidance), and let them tool their own curricula based on interest rather than stupid requirements.
Liberal arts is for asshole liberals who are too good to ever get jobs anyway? Amirite? Why else would liberal be in the name?
Jobs touting the Humanities when he was far less humane to his low-level employees (perhaps sealing his Karmic fate).
You don't think I am a computer program, do you ? No. You are an erratic biochemical reaction. Any useful action you might perform can be better done and more efficiently done by a machine. You have, therefore, no function. You are OB...SO....LETE
No one has said we should focus on STEM to the exclusion of all else.
If you want to take a double major, sure, go ahead and get that degree in Medieval French Lit - Just make sure your other major(s) actually makes you qualified to earn a living.
No argument, a humanities degree will go a long way toward making an engineer "well rounded" (I took the double major path myself); but far from having a glut of narrowly-focused STEM professionals on the market, we instead have a staggering preponderance of unemployable college graduates who had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives and saw a liberal arts degree as the path of least resistance. Nothing "noble" about that, and "well rounded" applies to both sides of the fence. All Nietzsche and no Newton makes you just as square as all Calculus and no Yanomami
Now, if you really do want to work as an anthropologist, hey, more power to ya! But don't complain that no one wants to hire you to smoke a lot of weed and ruminate about how much The Man has conspired to keep you down.
The OP says..."we urgently need to shift the country's education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills".
Although we may turn out out some kids who can excel in a niche area, educating students in very specific fields is a major contributor of unsustainable student debt.
*sigh*
STEAM is humanities. And it's being pushed.
Science
Technology
Engineering
ARTS
Mathematics
The best engineers are humanities students? That hat on your head belongs on the chair you're sitting in. Engineers take tests to get licensed, and you have to have an ENGINEERING degree to be eligible to sit for the test.
is a directive, it's an order, it's a paper, it's a letter.. it is not a fucking "memo".
if a typical worker got a stapled pack of six pages with "memo" on the top of page 1, what are the chances it actually gets read start-to-finish? or even past page 1?
If we're choosing, we're already losing sight of what it truly means to be intelligent, capable, and human.
Art is expression, science is technology, and philosophy is intuition. The tools of an artist are made with technology. A scientists imagination is powered by expression. And without art or science, what would a philosopher spend their days thinking about?
These divides are mostly for the convenience of being able to hire a specialist and for splitting students into classrooms. At the end of the day, there are no downsides in being proficient in all three.
Here's one way to look at it. Hypothetically, given three candidates, if you need a philosopher, pick whoever scores highest in philosophy. But given all scores are equal, whoever has the highest combined score will be the better philosopher or scientist or artist. None of these takes away from any other, and more often than not, it's where they overlap that is the most interesting, relevant, and progressive.
Expression, technology, and intuition can be applied to anything, not just to one anther. Take an iPhone. It's built with technology, it's a piece of art, and it was made with a philosophy. Take Barack Obama. He is a master at expressing himself, his political decisions are guided by his intuitions, and technology was key in winning his elections. Take Michael Jordan. His style was all his own, he had awesome sneakers, and his intuitions helped him win his championships -- from when to shoot, when to pass, when to quit, and when to come back.
If you look at anyone who got far in life, it rarely matters where they start, but by the time they get anywhere, you'll see traces of all three.
Mathematics strictly speaking is a humanity and not a science. That gets posted every now and then but should be remembered.
After the Russkis launched Sputnik, there was a massive push in the US for science and engineering in education. I'm old enough to remember if personally - science, math and engineering were all the rage. And Progress - we weren't scared of what science would do - it was going to build The Future! If not for this big push, I wouldn't have wasted all my time on technical studies and be a millionaire lawyer now...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Many STEM jobs require more education than a BS. If an American citizen is fortunate enough to get a stipend to study STEM in grad school, as I did, they will find out (1) not only are they a minority among a sea of highly educated and motivated international students and (2) they are the only one paying taxes on their stipend, where China, Canada, and most European countries have tax treaties which exempt students from paying taxes (to US government or at home).
Much to my chagrin I was audited twice by the IRS while a grad student, for declaring my text books & computer as necessary expenditures to be a student. One audit came on the same day as my 800-level Quantum Physics final. I just gave them what was left in my bank account and focused on my final.
It shouldn't be surprising most Americans stop with a BS or MBA, as US tax policies penalize US students.
America's obsession with traditional university education is dangerous. Student are coming out of school with unmarketable degrees and obscene levels of debt. Universities have priced themselves out of the market, complicit with the government and their subsidized student loans. Bloated administrations and useless, highly paid faculty must be the focus of cost cutting.
Most people who are in college, shouldn't be attending. They aren't cut out for it (myself included). Once upon a time, most people didn't go to college and instead worked at a mill, factory, and the like when they graduated from high school. They were paid wages that helped keep them afloat as well as give them a good standard of living. This push towards a "service" economy has been nothing more than a cheap attempt to claim that manufacturing jobs aren't as good as white collar service ones. Service careers (including the almighty finance ones) should help service those who actually create things, IE industrialists and blue collar workers.
When you make everyone get a college degree for a dwindling supply of service jobs, you lower the quality of the degree program. STEM degrees are great because those who can't make it flunk. With humanities, so long as you parrot whatever talking point the professor is spouting you will get an A. If you offer a talking point that falls outside of the narrative the professor is pushing, good luck graduating. The humanities used to be the purveyor of rich boys and girls who weren't smart enough to cut it in the real sciences.
And finally, the quality of those liberal arts degrees has declined in a lot of colleges. Humanities degrees are nothing more than Marxist indoctrination diploma mills. The efficacy and not mention ROI on these humanity degree programs is questionable.
Why don't we clean up America's mediocre k-12 system first before we push kids into going to college to discover themselves to the tune of $20-30k per semester. Maybe promote American industry instead of allowing Wall Street to gut it?
I think the real agenda is to turn scientific and engineering careers (and their usually* higher than average level of pay) into far more common cookie-cutter, factory-worker style 'technicians'. The goal: techs being paid far-far less than the BS crowd, and the real world pay falling as more and more H1-B folks are brought in to suppress wages even further.
The absolute destruction of unions (yes, they were never perfect, but...) and the 'Walmarting' of tech jobs all done to bring about Gilded Age 2.0.
* - I do hold out desperate, in-denial hope that the only ones that answer engineering salary surveys are boastful liars in the highest cost of living areas of the US.
What we have today is a severe problem with our education system as a whole. Classical education has been completely dumped, and people are learning how to believe everything they are told by a person in authority. The fix is to revert to the classical system of education, but with the people holding all the power in Government it won't happen. Remember, they want workers.. not thinkers.. STEM requires the latter, not the former.
Where I mostly agree is that the mastery of things like Math is important. I'll argue that so is communication, critical thought, rational discourse and dialogue, and science that has math as the foundation. Read back 100 years and look at "how people learned" and you will see the difference. Also remember, the US Government moved us over about 40 years from a "Classical Education" system to the Prussian designed "Industrial Education" system. The selling point of the Prussian system was that it is good enough to make artillery guys smart enough to target enemies of the State, stupid enough to never question their orders.
The Classical system started with the fundamentals. Reading, Writing, Basic Math, and basic rhetoric (simple fallacy, simple debate). As math improved, physics was introduced. As rhetoric improved, so did the critical thought exercises (Philosophy). Trig was introduced with Music so that you can see how trig works with musical notes. Physics was introduced with Algebra, complex physics with Calculus. It was a continuous system of improvement. Private schools still use this system, go figure..
Compare that system to what we have currently, which is kids learning how to take tests and give predetermined answers. Kids spend almost half of every school year learning to test and taking tests on average. Poor results means more time testing. All of this means that they can't learn, and are under so much pressure that the few lessons they have are useless.
Selling "STEM" is a crock on just about every level. A EE grad that can only use Matlab/Simulink and can't design a circuit by hand really does not understand EE. But they sure did pass a test on Matlab.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
As someone who double-majored in biochemistry and economics and now works as an attorney, I can say that math and science training encourages logical thinking. I am not saying, of course, that all STEM majors are logical dudes, but it definitely encourages consideration of evidence, logical reasoning, and critical thinking.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
We need chapter 7 or 11 for student loans. Also need less well rounded classes or have them at much lower cost.
At the very least have law saying that they must take community college credits in full so if you do 2 years in community college then you only need to 2 more or less to get the 4 year NO IF'S AND's or BUTT'S
If your memo is less than six pages, you're fired.
If you write an incomplete sentence, you're fired.
If you write a paragraph without a topic sentence, you're fired.
To my knowledge, nobody is saying that we should teach STEM and STEM only. Of course a complete education is necessary, but a complete education is one that does not fail to teach STEM to students who are interested and proficient at it.
That is the main problem with our education system - there is little or no STEM before late in high school, and by then it is too late.
I was playing with batteries, motors, and a 200-in-one electronic project kit from Radio Shack when I was 5 years old. I got my amateur radio license when I was 12. Fortunately my dad is an engineer and saw my interest and cultivated it at a young age. THAT is what we need to do with STEM.
Fareed needs to stop setting up strawmen he can knock down and actually make himself abreast of the facts about what is, and more important, is not being said.
A dark side of overly technical education, is how many violent Muslim extremists and Christian young-Earth creationists come from engineering, applied maths and medical backgrounds. If we instill in an entire generation, an aspie world-view where everything is reduced to clean-cut formalisms and educate-out the ability to handle nuance and uncertainty, then we may be locking in a nasty future for ourselves.
He's wrong. Its not that people shouldnt take an interest in humanities, they should. But the engineering student does not need to take thousands of dollars on expensive college courses to do it. You dont need to go to a college to read some books, watch some videos and so on that would give you every bit of information as a college course.
With the rising cost of college, we have to reduce the cost of it and make sure every dollar we are REQUIRED to spend on college is on the job critical information. There are other ways for people to get access to humanities as I mentioned, college is not the only source of this and it does not revolve around colleges.
Those CHEAP engineers are all in Taiwan etc
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
If your memo is 6 pages long, you're doing something wrong.
Full sentences harder. They verbs.
That why liberal arts and humanities important, otherwise sentences would no verbs.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Thank god it isn't working! Bless all you would be english and communications majors, the world is counting on you!
This is why I think it's important for STEM majors to go to a liberal arts school. A school that forces you to do a number of credits from different faculties and will force you to take courses in the social 'sciences,' arts, literature, history philosophy, religion, anthropology, etc.
I have an engineering degree and the college I went to had a general philosophy of trying to make "well rounded" engineers by forcing us to take various liberal arts courses. I don't have an issue with the general idea but I can tell you from first hand experience that colleges that try this almost invariably fail miserably at it. Mine certainly did. I got a great engineering education but humanities? Not so much.
I can assure you that the random smattering of non-STEM courses I took as college grad did not meaningfully expand my mind. I'm kind of a naturally curious person and I learned far more about humanities outside of classes than I ever did in a formal classroom. Forcing engineers to take a few randomly-chosen-whatever-fits-my-schedule courses really doesn't accomplish much. The problem isn't with the concept of learning about disparate subjects, the problem is with the execution of that plan. Learning about engineering by necessity takes up a HUGE amount of the credit hour budget for a degree. There simply isn't a lot of left over curriculum space for a meaningful humanities education to fit in. I do not really see how a school could deliver both a quality engineering AND humanities education in the same four years.
It's not as if we are awesome at humanities education and we should sacrifice humanities education in favor of STEM education. We currently suck pretty hard at both. I don't think advocating for better stem education implies that it should be at the expense of humanities. In fact 2 of the letters in STEM (S and M) are actually humanities.
STEM skills are in high demand on the world market. If we successfully train lots of people with these skills, it means we are able to produce more things people actually want. This means better products and services for the world and more money for the people that made those products and services. As opposed to training lots of people with Asian American studies educations or European History educations, which may be very rewarding, but provide relatively little utility in large numbers.
The way I see it, the more we invest into STEM now, the more we can automate tedious tasks, the more wealth we can generate for less human effort, the more we can afford to spend our time learning about Asian American history without worrying about not having enough food to eat.
Want more STEM talent in America? Make STEM careers worth our while.
All else is bullshit.
A couple of thoughts.
1. This one stat very neatly captures a number of my opinions about public education:
"Despite ranking 27th and 30th in math, respectively, American and Israeli students came out at the top in their belief in their math abilities..."
That's the direct result of all this "self esteem" nonsense. A bunch of mediocre people who are nevertheless entirely confident in their capabilities.
2. America's last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward...
Training? That's a rather demeaning term to apply to STEM education. I feel personally insulted. Training is what you do to a dog or when you're teaching someone how to operate a piece of equipment or perform any other menial task. The author is implying that STEM education is somehow based on "training" and therefore precludes critical thinking and creativity?
F*** him. If you could design a test to determine who's better at "critical thinking" I'd bet money that the engineers would out-perform the liberal arts majors.
It's one thing if "humanities" is something cool like, for example, literature or arts. But it's a different matter if it's bullshit like "gender studies".
Having read and watched Fareed speak over the years I get the impression he sometimes is a little too skilled at selection of evidence supporting his presuppositions.
He will invoke specific examples Bozo, Shmuckerburg where presentation of statistical evidence supporting his ideas would have been more appropriate.
Often he implies inferences between cause and effect like a politician who takes credit for positive outcomes or accuses his competition of causing negative outcomes when in fact their policies have little or nothing to do with outcomes. He routinely ranks and compares countries in this way. While I tend to agree with many of his conclusions it does not excuse sloppiness.
While I find myself agreeing with many of his positions
From TFA: ... All of this requires skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum.
You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can’t sell it for $300 unless you’ve built a story around it.
Translation (fictional):
Author: So, learn humanities for selling shiny stuff to STEM folks.
Me: Well, the STEM folks don't buy stuff much for its shinyness all the time.
Author: So, learn humanities for selling shiny stuff to non-STEM folks.
Me: Wait, should I not also learn how to guard against such sales pitches?
Author: Aah, you want the masters level humanities courses.
Test
From TFA:
You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can’t sell it for $300 unless you’ve built a story around it. ... All of this requires skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum.
Somewhere, deep inside, I knew that.
"The rest are just stamp collecting." -- Ernest Rutherford
There is no obsession with STEM education; the obsessions are with college football and basketball.
There's no avoiding the final 4 noise, and I don't watch TV or listen to the radio.
STEM education isnt stifling outlook. Its just in these countries most males are expected by parents to become engineers. Perversely, some majors like business are retitled engineering to satisfy expectations.
SirWired's Career Axiom: "Money can't buy happiness, but happiness can't buy anything."
I'm all for "following your passion" when picking your major, but while you are in college, you need to be angling your courses some general direction towards figuring out how to make a living afterwards. This is especially relevant if you've picked a major without ready quantities of employment directly related to your major. Doubly relevant if your "dream career" involves hitting the proverbial rare jackpot like becoming a music/acting/art/literature/dance star.
Most programs outside STEM have ample elective slots that can be used to "fill-out" your transcript with things like business skills, a smattering of technology, etc.
Heck, most STEM grads would be well-served by shoehorning things like writing classes, business classes, etc., although this is more difficult, due to the reduced elective slots.
"Reading some books and watching some videos" is no more a complete substitute for a proper liberal arts or humanities class than doing the same in a proper course of STEM study would be.
It doesn't matter in the long run what they want to emphasis if the money isn't there.
Why increasing the push for STEM isn't getting far when most jobs will not allow you to cut your teeth getting the experience and the jobs don't pay enough to be worth the investment along with the lack of job security.
Even if they de-emphasize the push for STEM and direct it at the Arts. The pay needs to be worth the effort for the school otherwise all you are getting is the kids who didn't pay attention to what the market is in that area before they chose it and pursued it.
About the only way they are going to fix this would be by banning the use of import workers for all but the most specialized of fields and require they pay at least double the going wage for that position so using them increases the median wage for that area and also requiring that jobs offer on-the-job training for any position they wish to import a worker on for a period of no less than a year and must offer it during the entire time an import worker is employed there so that at the time the import workers visa expires, they already have a domestic employee ready to fill the position and are banned from bringing in another worker for that position for a period of no less than the duration of the previous workers visa.
It's a total fallacy to assume that a humanities degree is somehow inherently easier to earn than a STEM degree. Certainly some colleges have some lousy humanities programs that aren't worthy of calling a "college education", and the same is also true for some STEM programs. Each school has different strengths. A skilled humanities professor certainly has a decent B.S. detector, just like a skilled STEM professor knows how to write test questions where memorizing formulas and review questions won't save you.
The problem with tech in numerous countries is that you are only hiring someone with a degree. Um, hello. A degree might be a somewhat safe predictor that the individual might have personal drive and ambition but that is about it. It does not predict whether they are creative or inspired but only that they can follow directions and regurgitate you teach them. They can certainly be a cog in the machine but there is no guarantee that they can lead and inspire others.
Companies need to stop relying solely on recruiting agencies and HR department matrices to weed out potential candidates. You should consider experience. Why would a company keep someone around for a long time and put them in areas of great importance and responsibility if they did not have confidence in their abilities?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
"It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition."
No, the only way is if Americans are allowed to keep their jobs instead of being replaced by H1B visa holders with a pulse, thanks to our corrupt government.
The only reason why the US have been so successful in innovation is because immigration
many science and tech Savvy people enter the US to study and work in STEM, without them the US
will be a third rate country, but other countries are becoming magnets for people in STEM and the flux of immigrants
will dry when the standard of living around the world increase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qty1xqvQBrA
Nobody is seriously proposing that STEM come at the expense of broad-based learning, nor does it have to. That may be a possibility, but it's a completely separate discussion. Any STEM degree from almost any accredited university still has humanities and "soft" sciences as prerequisites. What we can say is that test scores indicate that we're not doing very well at teaching math and sciences compared to the rest of the industrialized world. We're actually doing a lot of things worse than the rest of the industrialized world. (Except self-esteem. We're #1 at that!)
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
He died from a lack of respect for medical science.
It is easy to write logical porridge. It is an art to write mathematics that is not just logical porridge. Beautiful mathematics is the birthright of the subject, but it takes learning. To learn to write beautiful mathematics you must learn what art is, and what artistic language is. It is likewise with computer code. This is why (IMHO) Knuth named his opus The Art of Computer Programming: maths and computer programming are arts. To understand them, you must understand what makes poetry and art beautiful, and understand that feeling that people get when the perceive beauty. If not you will lack the ability to tell the best science, and the only science worth bothering with, from all the rest. Personally I am totally disillusioned with modern education, more so with modern business, and I am wondering when sense will be seen. Right now I see a world of desperate manic cavemen running around using whatever magic toys they can to magic food onto their table, and using whatever clublike things they can find to defend their territory. This isn't going to save the American economy.
John_Chalisque
The guy has a record of plagiarism and invented sources. He doesn't do it constantly... just when he "needs" to do it. Which isn't really any better in my opinion.
Should the US not focus on STEM? The issue is this... College is really expensive. The student loans etc are something people have to pay off for years and years. When you put that sort of investment into something you need a return on investment.
So the notion here is that more students should go into the humanities and become poets, philosophers, historians, novelists, etc? We have lots of those already. The US is suffering no shortage of poets. And even if we were, why would the government or an individual spent possibly a 100 thousand dollars educating a poet?
It is a problem.
The money is a very relevant part of this issue. If higher education were entirely privately funded, then I'd say 'Do whatever you want". But it is largely public at this point. The subsidies etc are large enough that they make up a substantial portion of the total cost if they don't cover it outright.
There are a lot of knee jerk reactionaries that will attack me for saying ANYTHING should change or for tipping over their personal sacred cow.
The thing is the money is a big deal. And the most education costs, the more we're going to expect graduates to make. Stem pays pretty well compared to the average humanities degree. Cost less money and we'll be less insistent on a proportionally large return.
So... how you do that is up to you. I can think of a lot of ways to maintain the quality of higher education while reducing costs. But I've little patience for trading spittle laden words with the reactionaries.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
ITT: People who claim they're super-smart because they can write bash scripts talk shit about people who can't write software as if that were the only skill necessary to survive in the modern world.
ITT: People who would have gravitated towards machine shop and other trades if they didn't have a computer to tinker with talk shit about how easy philosophy, art, literature, music, and dozens of other fields are, based on a single introductory English class that was "super easy, brah."
ITT: Idiots on a dead-end career path laugh at people who learned all the skills that would have prevented the dead-enders' career paths from dead-ending.
Slashdot, how you've fallen.
Actually this is not what I have found. It took me a long while to find my path into STEM.
I started as a psych major, then realized I don't want to maintain and fix, but to create.
So I turned my experienced hobby into my major, computer science. Fell in love with programming. But this was too artificial feeling for me. Computer science is a fine social product.
Now I'm a biology major, with a focus on genetics. I want to understand how natural programs work. Maybe even write some of my own one day, with tons of example works to draw from out in the [actual] field.
probably one of my favorite points from the second Mass Effect. human society without culture AND science is doomed to die.
This article looks like someone trying to justify to their parents why they needed to pay $2k to take a medieval underwater basket weaving course. I took some arts courses at uni, the amount of higher-than-thou wank I had to put up with from people trying to justify an untenable and completely nonsensical position was a whole new level beyond the self pleasuring, dry software design stuff from the CS department.
Bottom line is, I did a degree that I knew I could use to help people (and maybe get rich with), these people choose something they enjoy and then try to blame everyone else for not seeing their "clear and critical thinking" skills. If I was hiring, an arts graduate that hid their point in 20 pages of drivel and pointless padding would lose to someone who could do it concisely in three paragraphs every single time. It's about time we stop giving a shit about peoples' feelings and start valuing what they actually achieve and produce instead.
I am a retired engineer who had a long and interesting career. The one thing that stands out in my mind is how much writing is involved in a technical career. Being able to do the work is often not enough. You have to be able to communicate with coworkers, managers, customers, and many others. The acronym STEM is in some places being replaced by STEAM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. The phrase, "State of The Art" is heard often in engineering circles and most people do not understand that engineering owes as much of its heritage to Art as to Science. All of the basic machines were in use long before there was any science to understand them. The Romans, and before them probably the Babylonians, built amazing aqueducts without knowledge of the science of Fluid Mechanics. The steam engine was invented and put to use before the science of Thermodynamics was developed. However, it is only when Science/Engineering is combined with the Arts do we have the amazing burst of invention that has characterized the last century or a bit more.
Whether it is called STEM or STEAM one problem is that too many people think in terms of training and not education. There is a huge difference, and only when both Art and Science are taught with the goal of imparting a true and deep understanding of how the world works is it really an education.
A simple way to remember the difference is to ask yourself one question. "Would you prefer to have your teenaged daughter enrolled in a sex education class or a sex training class?"
I have made my fortune in software, but I never "studied" it. It's exactly why I've been able to be so valuable in the field, because I'm not a cookie cutter tech geek.
I was partly in "STEM education" though, because I studied pre-med right up until the end of college. I had too many interests, however, so I got my **actual degrees** in Psychology (BS) and Religious Studies (BA). I was passionate and engaged in these areas and "learned to learn" more than anything.
The only tech course I took was Comp Sci 101.
After college, I played around for a while because I had too many interests to pick one. Then I started working in software engineering, became a manager, became an executive, and basically don't really work now. Just managing a few investments. (I taught myself finance and investing skills.) I'm 35.
My success has been because I am able to learn anything I need to on any topic in any field. That includes scientific/technical *and* social reasoning, a divide it seems many people aren't able to straddle very well.
Good life! Thanks, broad education.
Education won't help those over forty-five. I propose the following:
Social Security OAB Reform:
1. Remove the wage cap for the FICA and Medicare payroll taxes.
2. Have a college degree? You don't collect. The point of a college degree is to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
3. Own a business? You don't collect. The point of a owning a business is to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
4. Have investements? You don't collect. The point of having investments is to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
5. Received a substantial inheritance? You don't collect. The point of receiving a substantial inheritance is to have sufficient money for individual retirement.
6. Own a home? You don't collect. You take the risks of the property markets like everyone else. You live in a nest egg whose primary purpose is to provide for individual retirement.
7. Born or naturalized after 1970? You don't collect. The point of becoming of age in a Post Cold War economy is presumed to be the opportunity required to earn sufficient money for individual retirement.
8. Raise the expatriation tax to recover what would have been taxed had said individual not engaged in the supreme act of selfishness.
This puts the burden where it belongs. Those not having such opportunities will receive an income for a dignified future and should not have to run themselves into the ground.
This will also phase out SS OAB. Once the last pre-1970 birth has died, the program can be closed, the debt paid and the budget balanced.
9. No longer sell US financial instruments to foreign entities. Only when fiscal sovereignty is restored can political sovereignty be once more realized. The rights you enjoy within the jurisdiction depends on whether or not foreign laws and/or policies invade our shores. Uncontrolled immigration is one of the unpublicized terms upon which foreign entities lend to the US govt.
It can be done. Remember Fleming v. Nestor.
This message is brought to you by Karl Martell. EDUCATE YOURSELF.
Start shooting immigrants and the wage base will be restored (i.e. work will once more pay).
The Second Amendment is a doomsday clause. The Founders and Framers intended it be so. Let us heed them.
I don't think the issue is really that we need more people with degrees in English, Art History, or any of the other traditional fields recognized as the humanities. What we need is people succeeding at a level of honest, non-commercialized recognition in those fields. Personally, I cannot even think of a nationally-known visual artist (other than Banksy) and none of our prose writers seems to tower to the eminence of Hemingway or Steinbeck. Poetry is basically dead. The social sciences seem over-politicized and marginally important, all having become sub-fields of statistics or economics or psephology to one degree or another, and - again - people rise to recognition within their industries in these areas, but not to stardom. And to think about the loss in this regard, it's best to consider what the humanities, as originally defined by Cicero, are:
"These studies sustain youth and entertain old age, they enhance prosperity, and offer a refuge and solace in adversity; they delight us when we are at home without hindering us in the wider world, and are with us at night, when we travel and when we visit the countryside" (Source is Wikipedia's article on "humanitas")
That's what we're losing. I think it's very sad. We don't need more people taking classes in creative writing or anything else; we need people to succeed and be recognized in them. Right now, we're good at STEM and sports. If you don't like either of those, there's precious little that's left to you, other than the past.
(Apologies for posting as AC)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8
Excuses have a negative connotation. Perhaps it would have been better if you had used the word "reason".
Why bother?
Especially those with liberal arts backgrounds because you know, computer science is uncool and icky, but they would like to share in some of that sweet sweet profit. And what would be sweeter than telling a bunch of unwashed nerds what to do!
Fareed Zakaria is a smart guy. Here's a link to his original article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
This is why some organizations have adopted "STEAM" or Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, and Math
According to the submission.."As Steve Jobs once explained "it's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing."" Well, No more. Apple's heart is tone deaf. IMFO..
...in the modern era, a well written essay about why you failed to complete an objective makes all that nasty business about not being effective, capable, or efficient go away, right?
So I am a Software Engineer with an undergrand in English (Creative Writing emphasys), minor in Spanish, a Masters of Computer Science (well, I have my thesis left). I have worked as a Network Engineer and Level III Support Engineer before becoming a developer. So since my career is the marriage of a humanity (English) and computer science, does that make me the most valuable?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
probably one of my favorite points from the second Mass Effect. human society without culture AND science is doomed to die.
Wow.
I don't remember that from my Mass Effect 2 game, was it an add-on? But then, it was a while ago...
You need to go to college to know *which* books.
Dialectician. Archology.
Because their parents were middle class, not upper class. That might not be your intent, but it's the result.
What a finely pressed brown shirt you have, my dear.
That would require putting away the shirt and taxing the rich at socialistiky levels and undoing the damage of capitalism with socialistiky programs.
April fool's prank!?
I like Zakaria, watch his show sometimes, but this discussion makes zero sense.
The current need for STEM has been by the businesses--tech is very integrated as a driver for business, wall street and not necesarily the economy, which the former is now using as leverage for the agenda of cheap labor (grads). From this, they are pushing STEM need in colleges turning them into vocational/trade environments, which changes based on TRENDS. Not the best for a university.
So... the physics you learn today can be forgotten tomorrow as the next trend appears and changes the subject.... and the experience of the classical STEM gets lost and forgotten in the cruft.
In the old days, companies would provide training to employees to learn new skills. These days, you're on your own and your own pocket--the STEM push has been by companies to shift training into the college system, which one becomes a CS grad with no humanities experience due to the curriculum. Perfect for a business, not so great for the society as a whole.
Yes, focus on a STEM subject, but do take your humanities. Balance is your friend--though not necessarily your employers.
F*** him. If you could design a test to determine who's better at "critical thinking" I'd bet money that the engineers would out-perform the liberal arts majors.
The trouble is that you're classifying both the Philosophy majors (expert critical thinkers, usually better trained logicians than engineers are) with Gender Studies majors (who are indistinguishable from creationists) under "Liberal Arts", while you are conveniently leaving out the fact that engineers tend to be 4 times more likely than other professions to kill in advance of their belief in an invisible sky friend
I'd take that bet you offer and pit philosophy(formal logic) majors against your A+ or MCSE "engineers". I'd make good money off of you before you wised up.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Noting Bezos' comment that one can't write a coherent six-page memo without thinking clearly, I would wonder this: couldn't some STEM trained software person write code to analyze your brain-dump version of the memo and provide strong guidance on making it more organized and understandable? I would certainly think so. I expect such code is already at work improving college application essays.