Let me start with a quote from a recent blog: “President Obama publicly opened the discussion when he called for a full and steady focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (S.T.E.M.) These are key to our future; this is the direction we need to take.” Barack and I agree on a lot of topics. As a sound-bite for today’s eye-blink attention span, this seems reasonable, likely to most of us.
The non-profit STEM Education Coalition – an “advocacy” group (a.k.a. PAC) makes a similar claim: “Our nation’s future economic prosperity is closely linked with student success in the STEM fields.” And with that I agree; the US lags in STEM education globally, and there’s no arguing that the jobs of tomorrow’s economy will require improved preparedness.
But what about our nation’s future social, humanitarian, and cultural prosperity? How do these goals fit in the prioritization scheme? Does increased emphasis on STEM mean decreased attention to everything else, a zero-sum game doomed to the ash heap of well-meaning educational initiatives? Put another way, what is the future value of a liberal arts education?
STEM education is certainly the foundation for solving certain types of problems. I’ll call them hard problems – not in the sense that they’re difficult (they are), but that they often have provable, irrefutable answers. Some may require exhaustive experimentation; others may be solved through creative analytics embedded in computer code. Many of these can be considered binary problems, logic problems that take thoughtful engineers to program into submission.
It almost sounds like we’re saying “Left-brainers, the world is your oyster! Sorry right-brainers, you may have been born a generation too late.” (Will natural selection result in a world dominated by left-brainers in the not-too-distant future?) Exaggeration? Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature.
But even for the successful STEM students, the all-consuming emphasis on STEM promotes a gross disservice, confining the definition of success to a rather narrow view of the world. How does one solve the soft problems, the people problems? How do you learn to live in an increasingly diverse and multicultural world where distances continue to shrink, where logical, and sometimes physical, borders are softening?
Binary thinking may be OK – desirable – in science and technology fields; a logical mind seems to be a prerequisite for excellence. And while science is a great way to view and understand the physical world, it still fails dramatically in the soft real world. (Sam Harris promotes – quite thoroughly – a science of morality in The Moral Landscape; don’t expect to see many Morality Scientists on LinkedIn anytime soon.) (Before you comment, that’s completely different than saying there aren’t many moral scientists!)
Attempting to apply binary thinking to soft problems is reckless; it leads to authoritarianism, simplistic viewpoints of right vs. wrong, good vs. evil. “You’re either with us or against us.” It’s a core symptom – if not a root cause – of the slippery slope from intolerance to hatred to violence spread most effectively by religious and political fundamentalists. This TED talk advises us to be suspicious of simple stories, warning "every time you tell yourself a good vs evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ."
Life, relationships, family, politics, society, cultural clashes – these are inherently messy, in a very colorful way. Even the Bible – chock full of simple good vs. evil stories – is as a whole an extremely messy book. My inherently flawed understanding is that it is intended to be interpreted by individuals; isn’t that why you’d read it? There are probably as many interpretations as there are independent thinkers.
Back to our future scientists and engineers. Short-term success may well be achievable and even directly correlated with grades in the STEM curricula. But your ability to communicate, to empathize, to interpret, to understand others that are not like you will influence your long-term success – and quite likely your happiness. There’s a reason that virtually every successful company embraces diversity as a core part of their mission statement. Let’s just be clear that diversity doesn’t mean knowing both Java and C#. “We need whole people.”