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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."
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
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.
Which they all did not because they had any real interest in furthering art, philosophy, or the advancement of culture and ideas but because a they were propagandized in thinking that university education makes sense for 'everyone'.
I am on what might be considered the leading edge of the millennials (I was born in the early 80s). I got out of school mostly before everyone started shouting "STEM STEM STEM" in my day the mantra was "college prep, college prep.." if you were a kid and even suggested to anyone anywhere you had thoughts about your future that did not include a 4 year degree, they immediately would launch into this diatribe about how you'd never get beyond sweeping the floors anywhere if you did not do so. Plenty of people worked your parents over pretty good too, encase they entertained any while notions about letting you find your own path.
So we ended up with a ton of people in colleges who really had not business being there. They got humanities degrees because those are largely subjective; you can award a degree and not worry about things reflecting poorly on your institution as much. I am sure some will disagree but the fact is that it at least at the undergrad level it is easier to walk out with degree in religious studies or ethics, than mathematics. Lets not forget college is expensive and thanks to the student loan bubble and the need to chase those dollars; I believe, can't prove, that many institutions felt a lot of pressure to issue degrees one way or anything so their graduations rates looked decent. So likely we have tons of humanities and business degree holders out there that were probably never good college candidates in the first place.
Its no surprise these degrees are not valued highly in the market place now. So the solution is to repeat the problem by pushing people into degree programs that are still considered valuable. The result will if anything will be to devalue these degrees.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Like everything else in this country, people seem to have this pathological need to take things to extremes.
I don't think it's about "going to extremes" per se, but people have the expectation and demand for a single solution and a single "right answer". They're looking for a "correct belief system" that can't be challenged and will never require revision. They're looking for "the correct thing to study in school" to the exclusion of all other topics, which should guarantee you a good, easy job that makes you rich. They're expecting there to be a "correct place to invest your money" which will return large profits every year with no risk whatsoever. They want a "correct diet" where they can eat some specific combination of foods that will make them always healthy and in-shape.
And those things don't really exist. They can't exist. But a bunch of people get convinced that they've the "correct" belief system, they run around trying to get rid of all of the other ones. Someone tells us the "correct" field to study is law, and then we end up with a glut of lawyers. We hear on the news that the "correct" place to invest your money is home ownership, and we get a housing boom followed by economic collapse.
"Going to extremes" is the result. "Wanting easy answers" is the problem.
Many colleges have a Philosophy degree in the Computer Science department
https://www.cis.ksu.edu/phd
I learned logic from NAND gates and RPN in my first year of an EE program, ymmv
Wherever You Go, There You Are
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?
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.
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.
Having known people who have gone to art school, art isn't any easier than engineering. It just requires a lot less math, but a lot more skill in actual art.
Art professors are some of the more mercurial individuals you will have the misfortune of meeting in a university setting. Some are great teachers, and then some like to take your project and light it on fire on your easel to make their point. While petting their small dog who is brought to class every day and likes to nip at the students. I wish that was just an exaggeration.
This, so that he or she can go out into the world and go work for Hallmark or some corporation like and make no money while having to mass produce "art".
Personally, if he doesn't want to study something requiring a degree, and he isn't actually any good at art, send him to trade school so he can learn something that isn't "hard", but will allow him to actually make enough money to take art classes on his free time if he likes it.
Art is *not* a waste of a $100k college tuition, but it IS a waste of money if you just think it is an easy out to a college degree and you have no talent. You might as well get your 2.0 GPA in Engineering and have a piece of paper worth the ink used to print it.
Here is a quote from the Zakaria article to think about:
'Critical thinking is, in the end, the only way to protect American jobs.'
His implication is that the humanities are a bastion of critical thinking. But when an introductory student is asked to do actual critical thinking where they might be wrong (i.e. introductory engineering, science, and math courses) they often conclude that they would rather go to the arts or humanities where the requirements of critical thinking are not as high.
I broadly agree, but I would like to offer a couple of additional points. Firstly, there are fact-based disciplines within the humanities. Secondly, STEM (especially the technology and engineering parts) can be (mis)taught in a 'how-to' style that is light on critical thinking and in-depth understanding.
Without a college degree your pay. Is capped at $40k a year which isn't enough in most areas to buy a house let alone have a family. Now that doesn't apply to everyone and some push beyond it but trade jobs for all but really good welders are basically capped at 50% more than poverty level for single people, and for under the poverty level for married with families.
So trade jobs equals poverty. Do you want your kids in poverty? What we need is not to boost minimum wage but to boost median wage. This country needs the 20million people earning 40k a year to earn 50k a year. That would boost the economy more than all the we combined did and would cost significantly less.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Solving equations and applying them to a requirement isn't "critical thinking". Critical thinking is knowing when and when not to apply those equations where there are no scientific theories to fall back on. The study of humanities can provide something called "perspective", which I find lacking in a lot of otherwise intelligent people who happen to be engineers.
You can be excellent at engineering and make a product that no one wants to use and have your job shipped off to someone who is equally good at logic and solving equations, but whose education is limited to rote learning of STEM with hilarious results when they are faced with a requirement that necessitates the least bit of critical thinking. Around the world, there is no lack of engineers, but you only need to look at the news to see that there is often a catastrophic lack of critical thinking.
Steve Jobs famously dropped out of college, but dropped in to take things like calligraphy courses. You needed good engineers at Apple to make a product, but you needed good designers and people willing to think... uh... differently about problems to make their product valuable to humans above and beyond their immediate technical capabilities. There are people who will buy an iPhone over a more modern and capable Android device because Apple is actually looking at more than pure engineering in making a device. This has generated actual monetary results for them.
I like solving problems that have clear answers and applying those answers. However, I derive a whole lot more satisfaction in what I do by being able to put it into the perspective of history and the human condition. It also helps me understand the people who I am trying to sell a solution to and what makes them tick. We need both people who take STEM seriously, and people who take humanities seriously. What we don't need are people who don't take either of them seriously enough to understand their individual value.
You *can* teach someone to use a computer without having to teach them calculus. Or even pre-calculus for that matter. I know this because I see teenagers using computers every day. They didn't need STEM to teach them how to do it.
Hell, *I* learned to use a computer without any class and what STEM classes we had back then barely used computers as more than glorified graphing calculators. When I did take classes in college, it was because I was already coding, not because I needed the classes to show me how to use a computer.
Even programming is less science and math than simple logic. If you're going to be a coder, do you even need college calc? Sometimes you do, but nowhere I have worked has that been required for anyone except those who work on specific types of software.
I don't value humanities over learning math or science, but math and science isn't where the world is going all by itself. There is a word for people who ignore things like soft subjects, and those are called technocrats. Technocrats are often valuable additions to a society, but they cause unrest because they believe that there is nothing to the human condition other than the application of technology. This is often hilariously, and occasionally horrifically, wrong.
I have two degrees, one in Art History and one in Theoretical Physics.
I dropped Art in my junior year because it was TOO HARD.
Physics was way easier... read the book, take the test, done.
Art required creativity, research, brainstorming, craftsmanship, and a tough skin (because your work gets critiqued).
Today I'm a software engineer.
Everything useful I learned in college I learned in art class.