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."

Comments

Your illogical narrative does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Your illogical narrative does not compute

[nitehawk214]

My computer beat me at chess... but I beat it at kickboxing.

Way too many humanities majors

[jfdavis668]

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.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[jfdavis668]

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.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[ShanghaiBill]

... using this STEM market glut as a prime example.

People with STEM degrees have lower unemployment, and higher salaries. To say there is a "glut" relative to humanities is silly.

the ability to deal with people, to write well, to communicate, to create, these are also important job skills.

They are indeed important skills. But they are not "humanities". Sitting through a lecture on philosophy or sociology does not make one a better communicator, or better able to deal with people.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[ganv]

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.

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.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[Fire_Wraith]

Well, those people did have a point, even if they didn't understand why at a direct level. Essentially, you need job skills/education/etc. You can't get by as a low or no skilled laborer, and companies are generally not willing to train you. You can't do the classic "start in the mail room and work your way up" anymore, especially not if you're straight out of high school.

The reason for the focus on "get a degree, any degree" is that for some time, that was necessary not for the specific training it provided, but because it showed "I am educated, I can function on this level, I can learn what you need me to learn" to employers. These days, it's not enough, because everyone wants you to already have experience or training.

This is why the focus is shifting to STEM - because that's what businesses are clamoring for more of. But at the same time, a laser-like focus on STEM degrees, or even just specific non-college vocational training programs, are going to leave people worse off. There's a reason universities mandate a core curriculum, because they're supposed to be turning out well-rounded graduates (even if most people just view the mandatory classes as something to be suffered through, not a place to learn something). I see people all the time in my IT sector job that don't have that background, either because they never went to college, or they mostly ignored those classes, and never learned to write in the organized manner that Bezos refers to.

Myself, I earned my BA in History. I then promptly went to work for the one US employer that still takes people based solely on aptitude, and offers to train them (even at great expense) - the US Military. That's certainly not a path for everyone though, or for every field, but I find that it's one that's done very well for me.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[tnk1]

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.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[tnk1]

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.

Re:Way too many humanities majors

[emorning]

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.

Balance is the key

[grimmjeeper]

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.

Re:Oh the humanity!

[garyisabusyguy]

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 :/

Re:Broken thinking...

[GeekBoy]

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.

I find author's "facts" dubious

[bogaboga]

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.

Re:I find author's "facts" dubious

[jeffmeden]

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.

"I find author's facts dubious" sums up your comment rather nicely. Other (asian) nations might appear to be technological leaders because their airports are new and shiny (at least, the one airport at the capitol that you visited) and that's all well and good but as soon as you get away from the metropolis you see where the actual differences lie: in the US you have technology accessible to nearly 100% of the population, in terms of cost and functionality. That shit ain't easy. In developing countries, the upper half (maybe) can afford it, but the lower half live without even reliable electricity, much less a computer to grant them access to rich information/education/entertainment/etc.

Unpopular opinion: we need less undergraduates

[areusche]

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?

Re:Liberal Arts education is valuable.

[swan5566]

I think the root cause in a lot of this comes from the fact that the govt. funding and solicitation of college students for colleges/universities as their income streams heavily shapes the "ivory tower" mentalities found there, which hardly maps at all to how money is made outside of there. What you are taught in the ivory tower is what works well inside the ivory tower.