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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."
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.
All I know is that I tested out of all of my humanities credits when working towards a degree
My daughter is going to college to become an English teacher.
I think that it is to spite me, but I bet that she'll be working as a tech trainer before long
To be honest, the sheer mass of the US student body pretty much guarantees that even the hardest push towards STEM education will only result in a small percentage of students really moving in that direction.
I only wish that most of the HR and Sales types that I gather requirements from had some baseline exposure to logic :/
Wherever You Go, There You Are
The fundamental idea is right...that it is understanding of the human condition that will be the biggest growth area in the next few decades. But he is wrong that this is an argument for training more students in current curriculum in anthropology or classics. The future belongs to people who can take the serious critical thinking characteristic of math, science, and engineering curricula and apply it in complex situations where technical details and human behavior are both important.