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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."
In my experience this is not the case. The ability to handle math does suggest the ability to think and analyse, however, it does not follow that you have the ability to communicate clearly and effectively. Much too often I run into co-workers who are technically very smart, but cannot even write an understandable email. Their emails are a series of long run-on sentences, often with little to no punctuation. At the end of reading them I'm often left wondering what they were trying to say.
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.
A friend of mine's son wants to switch from engineering to art. He got into Pitt's engineering school. Once he gets there, he discovers that it's hard. This is first semester. Hasn't even gotten to anything engineering related yet. He wants to switch to art, because it's more fun. He's not out to get prepared for a career, he wants to have fun in college. This is one of the major reasons we lack STEM graduates.
Yep, AC had me at, 'as important as have a good understanding'...
FWIW, I learned as much about economics from 'The System of the World' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_System_of_the_World_%28novel%29) as I did an MBA program
Interjecting knowledge transfer into entertainment, instead of foisting ridiculous misunderstandings and bullshit, would go a long way to bettering our society
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