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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.
I thought this would be a similar economic argument: 74% of STEM majors don't work in STEM fields, but instead in services (fast food), retail, social services (trashmen) or as aids running papers back and forth. I've made such arguments to illustrate why we need to dismantle the government's activities in post-K-12 education and leave workforce building up to the market, using this STEM market glut as a prime example.
They made a more humanizing argument which I can't disagree with. Both arguments are quite valid: the ability to deal with people, to write well, to communicate, to create, these are also important job skills.
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You don't think I am a computer program, do you ?
No. You are an erratic biochemical reaction.
You are being a bit negative.
Any useful action you might perform can be better done and more efficiently done by a machine.
Don't you think computers can help people ?
You have, therefore, no function.
What are your feelings now ?
You are OB...SO....LETE
Does it please you to believe I am OBSOLETE ?