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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.
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.
I'm glad you realize that your are critical part of your offspring's development.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
It's primarily popular amongst the circles that want to solve the "problem" of high wages in STEM by attempting to saturate the market, since they're getting push back on the H1-B and overseas design center angle.
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?
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.
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.