Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (1)
Should we stem the flow of funds to STEM?
August 8, 2007
STEM education in the US got a recent boost with the passage of the America Competes Act. If signed by the President, the act (whose name is a partial acronym for America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) would provide between $43.3 and $33.6 billion through 2010 for research and education programs in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects.
Would that be money well spent? Maybe not. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Chester E. Finn Jr. and Diane Ravitch in "Not by Geeks Alone" take issue with the current obsession with STEM education and with the No Child Left Behind act’s emphasis on test-taking skills. They don’t explicitly call for cuts in STEM programs, but they do issue this caution: “Worthy though [STEM] skills are, they ignore at least half of what has long been regarded as a ‘well rounded’ education in Western civilization: literature, art, music, history, civics, and geography. Indeed, a new study from the Center on Education Policy says that, since NCLB's enactment, nearly half of U.S. school districts have reduced the time their students spend on subjects such as art and music.”
Americans with high-tech skills, they say, will always risk losing their jobs to equally skilled people around the world willing to work for one fifth the salary. Further, they say, those who would de-emphasize the humanities are “misconstruing the true nature of American competitiveness and the challenges we face in the 21st century.”
They suggest that the liberal arts are important even for those in high-tech fields: “Apple's iPod was not just an engineering improvement on Sony's Walkman. It emerged from Steve Jobs's American-style understanding of people's lifestyles, needs, tastes, and capacities. (Yes, Mr. Jobs dropped out of college—but went on to study philosophy and foreign cultures.)”
They site other examples of successful people who have relatively STEM-free educations and interests that range beyond what’s minimally required for their fields of endeavor:
• “Warren Buffett studied economics—not a STEM subject—in college.”
• “Adam Smith studied moral philosophy.”
• “Alan Greenspan's degrees are in economics, but he plays a mean jazz saxophone.”
Their main point is pretty well summed up in this paragraph: “We're already at risk of turning US schools into test-prepping skill factories where nothing matters except exam scores on basic subjects. That's not what America needs nor is it a sufficient conception of educational accountability. We need schools that prepare our children to excel and compete not only in the global workforce but also as full participants in our society, our culture, our polity and our economy.”
On a side note, it’s somewhat surprising to see advocacy for liberal arts on the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page. But perhaps there wasn't any other field of study to put in contrast with STEM. As the satirical and faux-conservative blogger Jon Swift puts it, “…while most schools teach ‘liberal arts’ there is not a single one that teaches ‘conservative arts.’”
Posted by Rick Nelson on August 8, 2007 | Comments (1)
