Ask HN: What does HN think about adding “A” to STEM?
I have to admit, when I first heard about this I thought it was a clever joke. But at today's Apple keynote, Cook mentioned STEAM himself.
For those unaware, STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It's the category of fields considered to be in high-demand all over the world. There however seems to be a group of people concerned with inclusivity, and so they are pushing the addition of "Arts" to STEM -- i.e. STEAM.
Thoughts?
56 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadYou can reasonably tell a young person "study a STEM subject and you'll probably get a good job". You can reasonably ask "why are there so few women in STEM?". You can reasonably ask "why do so many students start high school without the maths skills needed for STEM?". You can reasonably say "arts and humanities students are being used to unfairly subsidise STEM students, because STEM degrees have the same tuition fees but cost much more to teach". Add arts to the category and it suddenly becomes a much less useful term.
I understand why arts educators want parity with STEM subjects, I understand why they want a piece of the hype and the funding that goes with it, but I think that the term STEAM might have a detrimental effect by creating a meaninglessly broad category.
Eg, we don't see politicians who want more people in STEM calling out for more people to go into anthropology, archeology, marine biology, horticulture, or linguistics.
The US government also seems to de-emphasize an education in ecology or climatology, compared to those fields like computer science which are more economically valuable for US companies.
i would find it hard to get #1 Son to do physics experiments for fun on his own, but he's pretty happy to learn about pendulums and gears using tinker crates [0]. somehow it's more interesting when the gears are making a bird mobile flap its wings.
[0] https://www.kiwico.com/tinker
But maybe that's not a bad thing! I really strongly believe that the coming decades are going to need engineers to think about ethics and culture a lot more than they have historically, as tech moves directly in the center of our lives.
I think STEM is fetishised a little too much, so maybe diluting it would be a net positive.
It seems to mirror the ascent of design in the tech world.
Might as well get the creatives working together early.
STEM encompasses all of science/engineering teaching, but in the context of STEAM, STEM is "how to make a thing", and STEAM additionally addresses "why to make it, how it should look" etc. I think the "A" is also likely a rather restricted subset of Art, in this context.
The STEAM idea has been around for some time. I first heard about it from John Maeda like 7 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yc-_Ei2Yto).
"STEM" by itself lacks an emergent, creative quality. There is very much a need for that in technical curricula.
I think many would argue otherwise, there is an inherent level of creativity with regards to all four disciplines, in particular Engineering, where novel solutions to real-world problems can be both practical and creative, although you might argue this extends into the other three as well.
Those strike me more as philosophical concerns than artistic ones.
Art isn't about explaining things, it's about expressing things. STEM is something along the lines of how the physical world works. "Why", almost by definition, is a question of philosophy. How it should look is a question of aesthetics.
So, in my opinion, maybe the synthesis is something like: Philosophy is "why", STEM are "how", and Art is expressing our answers to those questions and our feelings about them.
I suppose that in that case, STEAM makes sense. Making technology beautiful is definitely something a company like Apple has always kept in mind. Thanks for the response!
To me the common thread in STEM is the importance of quantitative skills, and everything else emphasizes those abilities much much less.
> It's the category of fields considered to be in high-demand all over the world.
The same WP page mentions one criticism of STEM is that the 'S' might not belong. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology,_enginee...
Personally, my favorite subject is the intersection of art & math. I wish math teachers would use art to teach math, and I wish more art teachers would use math to teach art, and feel comfortable expecting some mathematical rigor of their art students.
It seems like people have started thinking of "STEM" as some label that means "better or more worthy of focus than other disciplines and careers." That's probably because of the push to put more focus on STEM fields, especially in primary education.
There's nothing wrong with non-STEM fields, and I feel like this push to include more and more things in the label implies that STEM means "good" and non-STEM means "bad." It reminds me of the common recreational debate about which things qualify as "sports," as if any activity that isn't considered a sport is somehow worse than activities that are considered sports.
> I feel like this push to include more and more things in the label implies that STEM means "good" and non-STEM means "bad."
I take it that is the impression students are getting, or rather, teachers are assuming that students are getting, and in an attempt to curb any feelings of inferiority, they are making the addition. I think in this case, it is a dangerous precedent. University will cost the engineer as much as it will the liberal arts major, but you are lying if you tell a student that society values them all the same.
I suppose we would need to determine how to measure the value of a given field. Is value determined by impact on society/human civilization, or by job availability and salary. In either case I would argue that STEM fields rank higher, and of course even within STEM, some do far better than others, but suffice it to say, there definitely seems to be an agenda by stretching the definition of a very simple acronym to include fields that are probably being phased out. I seem to recall reading that Japan was no longer going to offer liberal arts in Universities.
I'm all for promoting the arts, but this idea is silly.
This feels like exactly the viewpoint that the "A" addition is trying to address. The arts are not the "opposite" of engineering, maths etc. at all, it's just an alien thing people don't want to admit they don't know very much about.
Of course the OP just wouldn't "start using STEAM", do you really mean to imply that people organically started using the term "STEM" separately without ever discussing it?
I agree that adding an A to STEM does not spell STEM, but I think the question is more about the merits of STEAM as “the goal” versus “STEM”.
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say art and STEM are “opposites”?
> I think the question is more about the merits of STEAM as “the goal” versus “STEM”.
Neither of these is a goal, they're words. Words enter the lexicon because they're useful. There was never hacker news post saying: "hey guys, we should have a word that encompasses all the in demand technical subjects" someone used it and others picked it up because it expressed something they wanted to express. STEAM is a perfectly well formed concept, and if people had any interest in expressing it then it would probably already be a word. Now, maybe people do have a need for this concept (I very much doubt it, but maybe) in which case I would expect to see it take off in usage. But trying to forward a goal by telling people they should change their use of language in some way is an inherently destructive process. For example, imagine a child asks you which subjects in school they should focus on, easy you say: "STEAMHLHGFS..." we've included everything in this acronym, and now there's no way for you to actually express anything to this child that provides the least bit of focus.
So Architecture / Industrial Design / Ux
etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16555514