> My objection is that all this talk about STEM is just the latest way to keep our schools focused exclusively on vocational training, to prepare our children for those mythological "jobs of tomorrow," jobs that may exist today
My first grader is going to college in 11 years. 11 years ago was 2009. The jobs were more or less the same. She’ll be graduated in 15. 15 years ago was 2005. The jobs were the same.
Second: the article conflates STEM with vocational training. It’s not. It’s an alternative framework to the “liberal arts education.” Even if the “jobs of tomorrow” are different, a STEM education will prepare kids for it better than a liberal arts education. The idea that a "liberal arts education" is the "all purpose flour" of education is obsolete. It's an artifact of the culture of western aristocrats.
> No, the purpose of education in a democracy ought to be to prepare children for their role as citizens and that means that they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority, that they stand up for what they believe in, and that they understand that their contribution to the world cannot be measured in money
A STEM education is better for that too! Citizens who cannot think about the world in numeric and statistical terms are not prepared to understand it, or the complex choices facing them.
> I did not enter the teaching game to prepare young children for their role in the economy
Teachers are deeply confused about their role. They're public employees who are hired to prepare kids for the work force because that is what taxpayers pay them to do. We don't spend $1 trillion a year on public education to have teachers indoctrinate kids on their philosophical and political views. (Now that I have my own kids in school, I understand why my mom, moving to the US from an Asian country 30 years ago, was so befuddled by the education I was receiving.)
>Now that I have my own kids in school, I understand why my mom, moving to the US from an Asian country 30 years ago, was so befuddled by the education I was receiving.)
Schools in East Asia, alongside pushing STEM topics are still also vehicles for pushing the philosophical and cultural views of the state through the teachers and curriculum, so I'm not sure why this is befuddling as such.
For a concrete example see Chinese medium schools in Malaysia, where it's not just about them being ostensibly better at teaching math or other STEM topics, but about Chinese language as a proxy for Chinese culture and values.
> Schools in East Asia, alongside pushing STEM topics are still also vehicles for pushing the philosophical and cultural views of the state through the teachers and curriculum, so I'm not sure why this is befuddling as such.
Schools in the US, at least in theory, don’t teach the philosophical and cultural views of the society. This is a concession to the fact that the US is a multi-cultural society, so teaching values as such would be inappropriate. Kids therefore get some instruction in US history, civics, and government, but you can get through the whole sequence without learning anything about Christianity or Western Europe.
She was befuddled we didn’t learn much math or science, nor anything else for that matter. In her words, she felt we spent all our time “cutting paper.” (Dioramas, mobiles, etc.)
>This is a concession to the fact that the US is a multi-cultural society, so teaching values as such would be inappropriate.
That in itself is teaching values. From kindergarten and up, American schools teach students that diversity is a great thing, and we're all equal, and it's what makes America so special. It's something we're taught to be aware of and cherish. That's something loads of other countries' public education systems don't teach at all, and some even teach the opposite.
How a country teaches values isn't obvious to someone raised within that country. It's just thought to be common sense.
> Citizens who cannot think about the world in numeric and statistical terms are not prepared to understand it, or the complex choices facing them... We don't spend $1 trillion a year on public education to have teachers indoctrinate kids on their philosophical and political views.
I think the "liberal" in "liberal arts" is throwing you off :-P.
Math, stats, and logic is very much part of a liberal arts education.[1] So are life and natural sciences, philosophy, history, geography, and political science. I would imagine learning all of these would make you a better informed citizen.
> In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process. Re-christening the old trivium with a new and more ambitious name: Studia humanitatis, and also increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, and added to them history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics), with a new emphasis on poetry as well.
In practice, modern “liberal arts” programs often dispense with logic, math, and empirical science. Again, from your link:
> For example, the core courses for Georgetown University's Doctor of Liberal Studies program cover philosophy, theology, history, art, literature, and the social sciences.
More fundamentally, it’s insufficient to throw in a few courses on math that everyone quickly forgets. Math, science, and logic should be the basic foundation for cultivating children’s world view, not literature, philosophy, or social studies.
For example, consider how kids learn about history. They read stories, mostly focused on individuals. But that’s not the only way to learn history. I took a class at Georgia Tech in the history of science, which looked at the impact on society of various technological advances. History education doesn’t quantify anything. But we have lots of data. What was the GDP per capita of ancient Egypt versus Mesopotamia? What are quantitative indicators we can use to help put those societies into context and compare them with ours? what was the infant mortality rate in India before and after British colonization? What were the demographic trends in Mandate Palestine prior to the creation of Israel?
> In practice, modern “liberal arts” programs often dispense with logic, math, and empirical science...it’s insufficient to throw in a few courses on math that everyone quickly forgets.
Where are you getting any of this from? What in the world are you talking about?
Since you mentioned Georgia Tech, I looked up their liberal arts programs at the undergraduate and graduate level.
Selected undergrad majors: Computational Media (computer science and design)[1], Economics (pretty mathy, check out the curriculum[2]), Global Economics and Languages (ditto [3]).
Selected graduate majors: Digital Media (tons of programming and design work[4]), Human Computer Interaction (tech-y by definition [5]), Economics, Infosec [6]. Seems like any of those degrees would require plenty of "logic, math, and empirical science".
But then one might say, "Georgia Tech is an engineering school. Of course their liberal arts stuff is going to be tinged with rigor. But them lefty, coastal, liberal hotbeds can't reason their way out of a paper bag."
So I looked up Wellesley College, one such institution. They offer majors in such soft disciplines as Astronomy, Physics, Astrophysics, Biochemistry, Math, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, Geosciences, to name a few.[7] They graduate students in these majors every year.
I don't think you understand the breadth of disciplines that a liberal arts education can encompass. There are liberal arts degrees attained by taking the bare minimum of math, or science classes and then there are liberal arts degrees such as geology that have plenty of hard (haha!) science and math behind them.
> consider how kids learn about history. They read stories, mostly focused on individuals. But that’s not the only way to learn history. I took a class at Georgia Tech in the history of science, which looked at the impact on society of various technological advances
What does a class you took at Georgia Tech have to do with how kids are taught history in school? They are different things. Kids being taught history poorly doesn't invalidate the importance of the subject. Kids are taught math and science poorly too.
Advanced studies in history do explore questions of the sort you raised.
> Math, science, and logic should be the basic foundation for cultivating children’s world view, not literature, philosophy, or social studies.
I think philosophy and social studies are just as important as math and science, and maybe literature is less important. First off, logic has its roots in philosophy[8]. Social studies such as history, civics, and geography are important for a well-informed citizenry. Economics is pretty handy. You may scoff at literature as being useless, but it forms the basis of the entertainment industry - plenty of money there.
There is an issue of terminology happening here. While Georgia Tech might have a "Liberal Arts College", that's not the same thing as a "Liberal Arts degree".
From wikipedia: "There is no formal definition of liberal arts college".
Here's someone else explaining better than I can: "A bachelor's degree in liberal arts means that the courses you take will be in general areas of study such as philosophy, mathematics, literature, art history, or languages, rather than in applied or specialized fields."
If you think that Biochemistry is a "liberal arts degree" then you've really misunderstood what the above poster was talking about. Biochemistry is a specialized field, and no one would consider that a liberal arts subject.
If it helps, you want to be looking towards degrees like:
psychology, business, literature, arts, sociology, women's studies, languages, history, political science... Does this mean these degrees will never touch math? By no means! But it's foolish to think the level of mathematical and technical rigor would be similar to a degree in, say, Physics.
Generally speaking, even a Physics student will take some liberal arts classes as electives, as part of a "liberal arts education"; what we might call well-rounded. But while the physics student might read a few books and find it interesting, and keep that as part of them for the rest of their life... it's generally not the case that a student of Fine Arts is going to take Calculus and occasionally wistfully perform derivatives.
Who runs the world? Not STEM people. Most politicians have a legal and/or liberal background. They may also have a background in STEM - particularly likely in Europe, less so in the US - but you get nowhere in politics without studying and understanding foundational liberal arts skills such as rhetoric, persuasion, and public debate.
The idea that liberal arts majors spend their entire time writing on essentially useless activities - like post-structural critiques of famous literature - is hilariously naive.
Some liberal arts academics do indeed do this, but that's because the liberal arts have pure and applied elements. Just like STEM. And STEM academics also spend their time on wildly impractical theoretical pastimes.
But at the applied end, the liberal arts run the planet. They don't keep the lights on - engineers do that - but they set the policy goals and define the political, economic, moral, and philosophical orthodoxies that virtually everyone conforms to, whether or not they're consciously aware of it.
>But at the applied end, the liberal arts run the planet. They don't keep the lights on - engineers do that - but they set the policy goals and define the political, economic, moral, and philosophical orthodoxies that virtually everyone conforms to, whether or not they're consciously aware of it.
In my country most politicians have a liberal background. Also nuclear power is illegal here. Coincidence? I think not.
> you get nowhere in politics without studying and understanding foundational liberal arts skills such as rhetoric, persuasion, and public debate
I’m skeptical that attainment of political power is easily attributed to a good liberal arts education. I think desire for power, some intelligence, and a relaxed relationship with principles go a long way. Well-crafted rhetoric...eh.
Funnily enough, most politicians* are from law backgrounds... which while it falls on the 'arts' side of the spectrum is definitely a specialized field and vocation.
I suspect that the dichotomy isn't so much 'STEM vs Arts' but 'Accountable vs Unaccountable'. Most STEM fields are accountable to reality and future employers, and law is similarly accountable to rival scholars of law and employers of new lawyers. That makes law a rather noteworthy outlier in the liberal arts.
And quite a few politicians have an equivalent of economics degree.
Those fields are in neighborhood of STEM more than old "liberal arts" standard of language, foreign language, art (painting or music) and history.
(Note: no ethics or philosophy.)
Physics, math, chemistry, logic, biology, history, geography, geology, astronomy, even economics are "accountable to reality". They are all liberal arts. Your idea of liberal arts is incomplete.
I think it's pretty clear from my posts that I'm not accepting this dichotomy - the "S" is science. Most sciences and math are firmly in the realm of liberal arts. I believe the argument is over how much T & E there needs to be in school and college education.
> even a Physics student will take some liberal arts classes as electives
ok, yes, STEM students study a little bit liberal arts
> generally not the case that a student of Fine Arts is going to take Calculus
But now you're asking a liberal arts student to study Calculus and derivatives, which are not easy topics and not something that useful in day to day life.
This is a blatantly double standard in your argument. Few STEM students go that deep in liberal arts to the "level of Calculus". It's like asking a STEM student to read Kant.
"level of Calculus" is not very deep, Calculus is a first year college math course at best, most who study stem take it already in high school, it is hard to get much shallower than that and still call it a college course.
Unlike Kant, knowing calculus will help you with balancing books. (And many other useful real world stuff.)
If you want to add something useful to the mix, try law, ethics (technically a subset of philosophy), logic (as analysis and rationality, manipulation) and acting. Group work can be exercised in any field, therefore including basic management.
I did basic accounting without needing any calculus. In fact I only used calculus after trying some machine learning. 90% of the population doesn't use calculus in their life.
>But now you're asking a liberal arts student to study Calculus and derivatives, which are not easy topics and not something that useful in day to day life.
Calculus is a high school subject where I live, at least single variable calculus, it's not that hard.
Maybe my education doesn't mirror most STEM people's, but I took philosophy, literature, history, etc. courses as part of my Bioengineering degree. I could also take capstone courses from various arts programs as electives, despite them being "deep in liberal arts". I enjoyed those courses for the most part, and I think we should have STEM students reading Kant. I don't agree with the STEM or nothing argument, but baseline statistics and classical science should be a requirement for everyone.
In my experience, the double standard usually goes the other way.
Many of the liberal arts electives I could choose from (as a physics major) were foundational requirements in that major. For example, in a literature class I took, the instructor was surprised many of us had not also taken Literary Criticism 101.
On the other hand, an English major friend of mine was able to take a physics course nicknamed "Physics for Poets", where rounding g to 10m/s/s was acceptable.
> even a Physics student will take some liberal arts classes as electives
I think you're missing my point. In the North American definition of the term, a physics degree is also a liberal arts degree. Physics is a natural science. North American liberal arts colleges offer physics degrees.
Liberal arts education is in contrast to applied or technical educations. For example, aerospace engineering, which is physics applied to a specialized domain.
Your definition of liberal arts seems to be "anything that doesn't involve too much math." Which is a weird kind of snobbery. (I'm speaking as an engineer btw).
>More fundamentally, it’s insufficient to throw in a few courses on maths that everyone quickly forgets. Maths, science, and logic should be the basic foundation for cultivating children’s world view, not literature, philosophy, or social studies.
Absolutely fundamentally disagree, and this is from someone that's studied primarily maths at every stage of education.
I'd much rather people were taught and viewed the world through the lens of literature and philosophy than maths and science. The world has too many 'DAE STEM???' 'OMG SCIENCE!!!!111' STEMlords already.
The thing that drives me nuts is that it is always presented as this dichotomy between teaching STEM and teaching liberal arts, as if you have to pick one or the other. The schools have these children for twelve or thirteen years. You could easily do both if you cut the shit and the nonsense and didn't waste their time.
You might have to track children according to ability, which is unpalatable to some. You might also have to have a revolution in the art of teacher education and practice, which is probably impossible due to the entrenched interests.
You could teach some motivated fraction of children orders of magnitude more academic information but the goal of primary education is equally if not more to socialize them into being what the society demands of its citizens. Seeing foreign elementary schools hammered this home for me, what I’d forgotten or assimilated so much I didn’t even notice it- that teachers are constantly reinforcing their normative values about whats good and bad behavior. Because this varies so much by culture its wild to see for example a Japanese elementary school.
Citizens who cannot think about the world in philosophical, historical and ethical terms are not prepared to understand it, or the complex choices facing them.
> It's an artifact of the culture of western aristocrats.
There are elements of truth in what you said. But liberal education is also the bedrock of western education and knowledge which includes STEM fields. Every stem field was created and advanced by those who came from "liberal arts education".
Also, liberal arts education has always included math and science.
Liberal arts education created the western world order. It's why the west is on top. It would be counterproductive to discard it. Perhaps we should just increase the share of STEM within the overall liberal arts education system?
> Also, liberal arts education has always included math and science.
Math and physics are solidly on the STEM side when people argue the merits of STEM vs liberal arts.
So instead of arguing semantics, understand what people mean. When they say "Don't study STEM, study liberal arts" what they mean is not "Don't study the more practical sides of STEM like engineering, study the liberal arts side of STEM like Maths", but instead "Don't study anything which requires more math than Algebra 1".
> Math and physics are solidly on the STEM side when people argue the merits of STEM vs liberal arts.
That's my point. I disagree with the assertion that STEM is separate from liberal arts education. Historically it hasn't been true. And it's not true today.
> So instead of arguing semantics, understand what people mean.
Not arguing semantics. I understand what people mean and I am disagreeing with them and I provided sources and historical proof.
> When they say "Don't study STEM, study liberal arts"
Who says don't study STEM, study liberal arts?
> but instead "Don't study anything which requires more math than Algebra 1".
You've built up an exaggeration of the side you are arguing against. That's not an honest portrayal of the issue at hand.
You can study both science/engineering/etc and history/philosphy/politics/etc. It's called getting a well rounded liberal arts education. The backbone of science, technology, engineering and math along with philosophy, history, politics, etc. My suggestion was increase the amount of "STEM" within the liberal arts education system we already have - particularly the technology and engineering. It's not an either-or issue that people like to portray it as.
My son learned letters, numbers, colors, shapes, could count to 100 and add two digit numbers as a result of his preschooling and was just beginning subtraction when he entered kindergarten.
I don't get your point. So you think the ability to teach a child what color is "red" and what color is "blue", gives you the background to make blanket statements about science education and jobs?
It's an arrogant dismissal to say early education is not serious education. The house built on sand will not stand...
Take your view of the author's lack of meaningful credentials regarding teaching to its logical conclusion...we ought to not have any classes except the final ones, so no math education, except for the last most advanced calculus courses, because math before that isn't really in the 'teaching game'.
You can immediately see how abrupt and flawed that approach would be. If anything, the greatest care is needed in the first steps.
Oh please. Your slippery slope argument is garbage. The truth is, only ~33% of 4 year-olds even attend preschool in the US [1]. So by the facts of reality, preschool is completely optional. Plenty of people go on to get college degrees without going to pre-school and it's ridiculous to claim it's the same as skipping high school.
Speaking of college... Unlike for real teachers, only half of public preschool programs require any sort of degree or qualification, and this guy works for a private preschool, which often have no requirements at all.
Indeed, after a difficult search, I found that he actually never finished college [2]. So yeah, he's basically just a random guy with no official background in education. So who the fuck cares about his opinion about STEM in education?
He got the job because his daughter went to the preschool. That's it. That's not a qualification.
Teaching students non-STEM stuff isn’t indoctrination by teachers into those teachers personal political and philosophical views. Do you seriously think that’s what goes on?
I did music, foreign languages, philosophy, art, business studies in a public high school in Australia. These subjects, obviously, had a state wide curriculum. I was not indoctrinated by my teachers.
That’s exactly what the article describes as going on:
> No, the purpose of education in a democracy ought to be to prepare children for their role as citizens and that means that they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority, that they stand up for what they believe in, and that they understand that their contribution to the world cannot be measured in money.
This is indoctrination into a specific value system.[1] None of this is necessary to teach kids math or writing, logical analysis, data analysis, or even the functioning of our government.
[1] As an Asian immigrant, it’s also largely not the value system I want to teach my kids. I’d rather have kids learn to respect authority, to respect the wishes and preferences of the majority of people around them, to be very considerate of how their actions affect others, to keep their heads down and work hard, to fully understand why things are the way they are before advocating for change, and that their function as people is to contribute to economy and thus the society and get a well paying job so they can support their own families.
I strongly suspect that for most Americans, or at least a large swath of Americans, the values they want to teach their kids hew closer to the above than “question authority.”
> Indoctrination (noun) - the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.
I understand what you're saying about conflicting value systems, but you're flat-out wrong that what the author describes is indoctrination. The key word from the definition is "uncritically".
Here's the key part of what you've quoted:
> they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority,
All that is the opposite of "accepting uncritically".
I don't think anyone is arguing that we remove liberal arts from the K-12 curriculum. There should be more to education than just vocational training, especially at the younger grade levels. If we want to have a functional democracy we need educated voters, and they should have a broad base of knowledge including the liberal arts.
At the college level I think the colleges themselves are to blame for all the animosity towards the liberal arts, they've priced themselves completely out of the market. Not too long ago it wasn't a big deal to spend four years getting a liberal arts degree and then going on to an MBA, Law or sales or even a STEM field to make a living afterwards. That's exactly what the author's wife of this article did by the sounds of it. Now that path might mean tens of thousands of dollars of debt just for the BA, so the pressure is on to make that investment worth while and for many it's not.
I don’t know anyone in tech who has a liberal arts degree, and I graduated 25 years ago. The authors wife probably doesn’t actually develop the tech, rather management.
Equally anecdotal, but I am in tech and have a liberal arts degree, and have a coworker who is the same. I also know a few others. In most cases these are people who found the job market rough with a BA (or MA), and fell in love with tech.
Some universities deal with this demand by offering a "Certificate" or something equivalent in tech for students so that they can learn the fundamentals even though they're from a liberal arts (or other background, but have a degree). Even going back like 50 years, my father studied liberal arts but was offered an opportunity to do an advanced degree in computer science, provided he completed core courses (in additions to the ones he'd already done).
I suppose my point is that this may not be as rare as it seems, and is increasingly common as a BA becomes a dime a dozen (although not intrinsically valueless) and the growth in tech jobs continues (for now).
You’re right it’s not a great fit. What I meant was “something we as a society reflexively say” (which shibboleth kinda captures) “which is obsolete” (which shibboleth does not).
Having been born in the early 90s I sure wish my elementary school teachers encouraged an interest in computers and used them for more than KidPix, AskJeeves and word processing. They treated computers like a fad then and failed us, let's not make the same mistake again.
>My objection is that all this talk about STEM is just the latest way to keep our schools focused exclusively on vocational training, to prepare our children for those mythological "jobs of tomorrow," jobs that may exist today, but are unlikely to exist two decades from now when our preschoolers are seeking to enter the job market... Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke. They are wrong and they have always been wrong.
It seems that Teacher Tom is missing the point about early STEM education (this seems particularly worrying given that he is a teacher). The point is not to teach preschoolers how to use, for example, TensorFlow so that they can develop deep learning models (who are predict if this would have any relevance for the future?).
Instead, the point is to help kids to develop a background in math, physics, chemistry, etc. whose basic foundations haven't changed in the fundamental way in the past 50 years. In particular, developing an understanding of math takes time, and seems likely to required for many jobs for tomorrow. Would Teacher Tom contest the point that math will be necessary for jobs of the future? Perhaps Teacher Tom's object was just to write a provocative article to generate blog traffic, (fair enough) but the argument presented in the blog does not seem very well reasoned.
>That's the way it's always been. That's the way it has to be.
My sarcasm detector may be off so if it was, please forgive me.
Why must it continue to be that way?
It's possible we must expect and accept that children from broken, impoverished, or abusive homes will just be, well, screwed in comparison to their better off peers.
Can't we instead look for a better way?
- Improve the funding and education of our public schools (particularly by the decoupling of property taxes being the primary source of school funding).
- Take a hard look at our current minimum wage and find a way to make it easier for hard working people to make ends meet, allowing them more time to nurture and teach their children.
Giving up on hard luck children is by extension giving up on our societies future. To me at least, thats simply untenable.
Because exceptionalism requires knowledge asymmetry, relative to the mean. I think it's definitional that You can't have a macro-scale program that delivers exceptional results to all participants.
I don't think mediocre is unacceptable. But, I do think the country's achievement systems do. And yes, we should look for better systems.
I don't think funding will improve the education system much, unfortunately. Probably we would be better off spending that money reducing the number of single parent families. (Somehow...)
I think I get the downvotes, although there is some truth. If everybody is exceptional, nobody is. For better or worse, we still live in system where parents are responsible for their kids wellbeing. You can't just outsource good parenting to school teachers. Just because somebody has this high paying job and doesn't have time for your kids at all, the reality won't reshuffle itself to make them feel like success. Do your god damn job as a parent, and don't just throw money at the problem.
On the other side, we all would benefit from good quality education for everybody. I mean proper benefit for whole mankind for generations, golden age and whatnot.
Currently, in many places which prefer predatory mindset (looking at you too, US), its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, the higher I am above everybody else the better I am off. Well, not really if you actually want to live in society. Otherwise you end up walled in your luxury home like in South Africa, with private security, but afraid to go out after dark, carrying guns everywhere, high crime rate etc.
People don't want to hear what they don't want to hear. The downvotes are reasonable. The vote count has little to do with truth, and much to do with affirmation.
I agree that we all benefit from a high quality education for the children.
I think you're describing 'Bellum omnium contra omnes'. And yes, we seem to be heading in that direction in much of the world.
If we consider the mean to 'that of the whole world' then, our task is done. A child from today needs to merely watch television for an hour a day, in order to be wiser than the average human being across time. School would be unnecessary.
Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.
> A child from today needs to merely watch television for an hour a day, in order to be wiser than the average human being across time.
Depends what you mean by wiser. It really seems we absolutely don't have the same definition.
> Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.
So what? Nowhere did I say it would deliver equally exceptional results to all the participants.
Just that it's goal would be to deliver exceptional results to all current participants, compared to the means of the rest of the world and all of human history.
How does your inevitable bell curve contradict or invalidate any of it? How does having internal variations invalidate any of it?
>we must expect and accept that children from broken, impoverished, or abusive homes will just be, well, screwed in comparison to their better off peers.
It is worth noting that a world where children from broken, impoverished (etc.) homes are not disadvantaged is a world where one cannot advantage one's own kids.
There is of course a strong argument for significant societal investment in keeping children from broken homes from raising broken homes of their own.
If every kid had an equally advantaged upbringing, the world would be a better place. The metaphorical pie would grow rather than just be subdivided more. Furthermore, the gains would be somewhat non-linear. There are many benefits to having a larger network of people on the same psycho-intellectual wavelength. Contributions from the marginal additions to the network would propagate back and forth across the network, adding value along the way in a manner that transcends the self. That is a strong case for greater state involvement and expenditure in setting our youth up for success, especially disadvantaged youth. It’s also a strong case for easing off of our property tax-based system for allocating school revenues, which naturally results in very different school quality. Even if you’re cynical about how much the government can do, let’s say that 20% of disadvantaged youth that otherwise would have led terrible lives instead become productive citizens and parents as a result of stringent, uncompromising education reform. That 20% will break the cycle for their kids, and after a few generations, the baseline level of parenting in this country will be improved by a good amount.
If every kid has an equally advantaged upbringing then by definition a crack-whore[1] is as good a mother as anyone's. I'm no social-psychiatrist but I'd wager 'wanting to provide better for one's offspring' ranks just behind 'food' and 'sex' as primal motivators.
Please don't take this as an argument against taking steps to improve education and opportunity[2], only that anything approaching true flatness would represent a massive disruption of social order and motivation.
[1] Literal.
[2] I agree with most of your suggestions; educated persons are valuable.
Yep, I don't disagree with any of that. What I really meant was that we'd be much better off if every kid had at least the baseline quality of parenting in upper-middle-class suburbs. Competition for even better parenting would still exist at the margins, albeit with diminishing returns.
> It is worth noting that a world where children from broken, impoverished (etc.) homes are not disadvantaged is a world where one cannot advantage one's own kids
This is such an uncreative, broken, zero-sum, awful line of reasoning. One can shift up both the bottom and top rungs of a scale simultaneously, so that there would still be advantaged kids despite there being fewer children from broken/impoverished homes.
In fact, such a thing has been done but not necessarily for morally good reasons either. This uplift is exactly what was seen when schools were desegregated in the South and the bottom (black schools) were uplifted: the emergence of private expensive religious schools that were effectively white-only, raising the uppermost advantaged bar as well.
Well, maybe one's own kids aren't really anything to write home about, hence they really could do with that kind of advantage over more talented yet poorer ones. But then what's the "societal" point in perpetuating such state of affairs?
Society definitely doesn't benefit, I think we can afford massive inequality much more easily than reduced social mobility. That the richest classes have the option to 'pull the ladder up' behind their children is an indication that democracy is not delivering the results it should.
But I don't think there are easy fixes, because there's also intergenerational social mobility - working class parents going without luxuries to send their children to a better school etc. It's very tough to give poor-but-ambitious families means to improve their lot over a long time without already-wealthy families monopolizing those opportunities.
The broken families in impoverished homes are far less toxic to society than the broken families in privileged homes.
See recent US and UK politics for examples. Although perhaps like attracts like, so if there's enough dysfunction around at all levels you get a politics of brokenness with dysfunctional broken leaders appealing to broken supporters.
But, that doesn't mean we can't move the bar for all students upward. We can look for ways to ensure the average student learns more, or has more tangible skills, or whatever else we want.
To go on a tangent, one very important topic (even more than STEM) that I don't think is formally taught at all is governance.
I think children should get a proper education formally and practically on how to balance and how to meet the political (in the sense that these are needs that are solved at the societal / collective level) needs of a group of people. It doesn't have to be a large group; along the lines of the entire school or talking about the needs of a district or city would do. I think that such education would go a long way to help people understand what is important in governance, and be more resistant to political ideology that is harmful to these things.
Not sure I follow. In a government, the primary need is that the people feel free, feel like they're not being ordered around by a dictator, that they can have fun or do what they want or set their own rules. Any rigid structure of governance that is focused on anything else will eventually fail. The constitution is a list of things the government can't do.
> In a government, the primary need is that the people feel free, feel like they're not being ordered around by a dictator, that they can have fun or do what they want or set their own rules.
> Any rigid structure of governance that is focused on anything else will eventually fail.
I don't think we are contradicting each other. The need to feel free and have flexibility in certain aspects of governance is a political need that needs to be balanced. An education in governance should address this aspect so that citizens are more tuned-in to abuses of office and institutions that infringe on freedoms that most citizens have not chosen to yield to the government.
Even though we were not contradicting each other, I do not completely agree with this.
> In a government, the primary need is that the people feel free, feel like they're not being ordered around by a dictator, that they can have fun or do what they want or set their own rules.
I think you recognize that this freedom here is quite qualified. The freedom to do what we want or set our own rules certainly need to be qualified at least around to the extent that they do not cause negative consequences to other people. Where the exact boundaries are are always shifting depending on the specific circumstances and population, and this is why various needs need to be balanced by government; i.e. the extent of this freedom is being balanced by other societal needs.
Hence I would say that prima facie, a primary objective is a balance of freedom and well-being of the citizenry, with neither need superior over the other.
On the other hand,
> [the freedom to] set their own rules
may sometimes be done most efficiently and reliably through governmental institutions, using government institutions to conduct certain self-funded voluntary programs.
> Not sure I follow. In a government, the primary need is that the people feel free, feel like they're not being ordered around by a dictator, that they can have fun or do what they want or set their own rules.
There are plenty of governments who have never felt that to be a primary, secondary, or even tertiary need. 'Plenty' here refers to an overwhelming majority of governments, through an overwhelming majority of recorded history.
> Any rigid structure of governance that is focused on anything else will eventually fail.
Are you basing this on the brief, half-century window of human history where liberal democracies governed something between a quarter, and a third of the world's population?
When I look at human history, it seems to be that despotism is the norm, and liberal democracy is a quirky, novel fad, that may fizzle out, just like acid-washed jeans, and pet rocks did.
One in five Americans cannot name any of the branches of government. Only 46% know each state has two senators. It is extremely difficult to get people to retain any knowledge they neither use nor care about.
Teaching children how to organize to solve their own problems would be antithetical to the incentives of any normal school’s administration. Children who can self-organize to oppose them are a threat. If people wanted children to learn how to organize, be capable and be self-efficacious democratic schools like Summerhill or Sudbury would be vastly more popular. They don’t. They want childcare that teaches children to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told.
Lack of universal success is poor evidence for failure here. School is the only environment in which anyone spends most of their day sitting down with minimal freedom to choose when to get up or freedom over when to use the bathroom. I spent about five hours a day sitting in high school. I imagine you did the same, as do the overwhelming majority of children who graduate. This is unnatural behavior and school teaches it. It also teaches obedience to authority and tolerance for pointless busywork. That not all children learn the lesson is not evidence it’s not taught.
Who do you trust to administer that test? I don’t trust anyone with the power to deprive other people of all effective power. If you don’t have a vote even the best “representative” in the world will place less effort into helping you than someone who also needs their help who can vote for them.
Yes. They do not deprive themselves of the power to vote as your proposal does. You may not care about the difference between the plausible candidates currently on offer enough to vote. But if the Communist Party seems likely to get into government suddenly a lot more people will care.
A power not exercised is still relevant insofar as it can be.
I'm not proposing to deprive anyone of the vote if they are willing to show themselves to be responsible.
I would make a simple criteria: if you are a net taxpayer, you get to vote. If you are a net loss to the government, you don't get to vote.
If people have control over their circumstances, then they will be able to arrange their life in such a way that they can enable their voting power and vote responsibly.
We are sorry to inform you someguydave that you have not shown yourself to be sufficiently competent. Your voting rights have been revoked. Have a nice day!
Alternatively, you could augment the vote of people who show themselves to be better informed than average. Let people earn "brownie" points by demonstrating 1) knowledge about the costs inherent in important issues before congress and the courts (economic, social, opportunity, etc), and 2) fairmindedness (by showing they know both sides of the issues).
This could be accomplished by taking a voluntary test based on free reading materials, or by earning a grade on free classes made available online and in community colleges and perhaps high schools.
Your grade then decides how much your vote counts. Your vote impact score might scale your vote linearly (0 to 1), or it could decide how much to augment a baseline of, let's say, 1.0, where the max augment is to add another 1.0 for a max of 2.0.
I'm sure there are lots of ways this might be done. The main point is to encourage voters to be better informed and more fair. Another goal would be to counteract mass media manipulators who spew disinformation and manipulate the underinformed.
Until we can somehow accomplish (especially) the latter, America will sink ever deeper into a political system governed by anger and stupidity.
I'm not sure a test is the best idea for sorting responsible voters because it would encourage game-playing and cheating. I would go by the quantity of taxes paid - it's hard to game and it is morally right that taxpayers should have more say in government for which they pay. I'm not sure what level of taxation would be appropriate to earn a vote though.
>One in five Americans cannot name any of the branches of government
When I hear these stats like these, I think about the bell curve of human ability. When you put it in those terms, the bottom 20% of people have IQs lower than 88. So it becomes unsurprising that they may not be all that up on the branches of government, especially given the irrelevance to their day-to-day existence.
Political theory is useless at school. At best children would be totally lost in the plethora of ideologies without proper understanding of why people invented them. At worst they would be indoctrinated with the ideology, chosen by the government (usually the case).
What we really need to teach children is decision making and responsibility taking. School is to obsessed with learning the facts omitting scepticism and problem solving whatsoever. Kids are being taught recipes, not how to act when you don't know the right one.
I had the same reaction. According to Teacher Toms tag line, he is teaching preschoolers. I am not even clear if he understands preschoolers.
My observations of preschoolers is that they are learning the rules of the universe. That means very hands on discovery of the practical side of how things work coupled with a vivid imagination and creativity. That sounds like STEAM to me.
When schools teach social and political subjects to young children they tend to simplify the subject to the point of not being true. Kids are not ready for nuance.
When I say governance I don't mean political theory, but something more akin to leadership.
Well, leadership, but less leading via thought leadership and more via listening, arbitrating, and brokering compromises between conflicting wants and needs.
From what I've seen they tend to go to either extreme. Some decry the technical subjects they missed out on as useless, some laud them as the pathway to a golden future.
It is amazing that almost 20 years in my career I can finally use some of my more advanced math because I now have an interest in PyTorch. I've forgotten a lot of calculus but I was really surprised how quickly a lot of it came back.
can't this be said about every subject? understanding of history takes time, of philosophy, of literature, text etc.
He is asking why focus on STEM more instead of art? The answer put forward by people is that there are more STEM jobs now. Will there be more STEM jobs tomorrow rather than artistic jobs? We don't know.
Kids have a limited learning time per day, so if you put more STEM time, then you take time from other subjects.
The answer is that art is not a reliable job and never was. This it is not likely to become one.
Even if you extend it to writing, making music, advertisements, taking pictures and making GUI.
Unlike these, mathematics (the M in STEM) is almost every other non-physical job that is not data entry. T is the remaining ones that are physical (mechanic, electrician, hydraulic).
S covers additionally the teachers themselves, doctors and biologists who don't need as much math.
Heck, even modern agriculture.
The remainder is probably building, some service works such as sales, nursing, care for small children, purely physical labor, parts of logistics, gardening and forestry.
Yes as some one who did go the vocational route in the UK a while back - you had to have passed maths chemistry physics etc to even be accepted.
Ironically for careers like banks which are now grad entry the requirements back then for a vocational track where 50% higher than it was for an entry level Bank job, I had to have 6 o levels and I had to do an extra 1/2 day a week for the first year to get technical drawing
Well, "careers like banks" have changed a lot since the days of O-levels. Pretty much all the customer-facing stuff has gone, along with much of the more routine (and therefore automatable) back-office work.
I think the actual usefull training, would be - the generalizable abilitys- managers, programers, they need to be able to budget time, to think abstract, to take steps back, think about the overlap of all the fields people migrate- and you have what should be schooled.
But that is very difficult to train for.. cause abstract abilitys without direct application dont stick, unless you felt the pain.
> Instead, the point is to help kids to develop a background in math, physics, chemistry, etc. whose basic foundations haven't changed in the fundamental way in the past 50 years.
Nice theory, and I agree wholeheartedly. It takes a special kind of teacher though to implement that against the push back of students ("what will this ever be good for?"), parents ("get our of your ivory tower and teach my kids skills that will give them a good job") and politicians ("we need more specialists and it must cost $0").
That would be easier if that pedagogical approach were the norm and vocational training the exception, but in addition to these three interest groups, such a teacher often also has to deal with other teachers who are not interested in a trouble maker colleague who may create additional work for them.
I agree that 10 year olds probably don't need to learn javascript and the camps teaching that are probably not a great choice for parents. But the authors views on STEM are awfully pessimistic. There are a lot of creative aspects to what I do, and I don't want people thinking that it's drudgery working in STEM.
>Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke. They are wrong and they have always been wrong.
Well, historically they have been more right than wrong. For millennia jobs were more or less constant (farming, the trades, commerce, mercenary, etc) so it was even very easy to predict. And for the best part of the industrial era, "more STEM" would be both easy to predict and an easy win. As would be "more office/services jobs" in the mid-20th century, and "more IT jobs" in the 80s and on. All of those existed as guesses and were correct. So where are those guesses that "have always been wrong"?
>Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke.
That's also a bad argument. Nobody claims "specific skills".
A STEM education is not just some specific skills, it's a very wide range of skills, that have been useful to the best job positions for centuries.
Don't see that changing, unless widespread general AI (not the crap we have today, with task-oriented NN models) takes over most technical and scientific jobs renders poetry and painting and music playing the only jobs available to people. Which I don't see it happening in the next 50 years or so, if ever.
Having been on a school board I can tell you that it’s the Gadgrind administrators and parents who are pushing that. I would love to have the kids receive an exciting and inspiring introduction to maths and the sciences (and for that matter language and civics) but many of the teachers (not a majority, but significant minority) aren’t into it and the loudest parents certainly aren’t either. Instead the kids get rote prep aimed at where the puck is now.
This sort of vague condemnation of STEM and praising of liberal arts never seems helpful. All math is bad? We shouldn't teach any? Are all liberal arts classes are equally good?
You need to discuss some sort of real curriculum. Or at least what changes you'd make to a current one.
Spoken (I guess written) like an out of touch, over privileged idealist. Sure, forget about being able to get a job and make money down the line, that’s not that important. /s
Japan has removed all humanist subjects from thier universities.
I would refer to these STEM subjects in this order instead, because thats how they depend: math, physics, chemistry and biology. MPCB does not sound as good though.
As for jobs they do not exist; only work exists, and you need to spend energy to do it.
One last thing, we need to have more female teachers in these subjects, since they are not trying to keep secrets.
Men keep secrets to get what they want, which mostly is women.
> It's a scam as old as public education, an idea that emerged from the Industrial Revolution because back then the "jobs of tomorrow" were stations along an assembly-line
Is he suggesting here that public education is a scam? It doesn't seem so in the later paragraphs, and that's an extreme view to hold. Also the idea I don't think actually emerged as a way to fulfil national labour requirements. Condorcet, I think an early French pioneer in public education systems, seemed primarily concerned with equality, not creating labour supply.
Schools and colleges should prepare students to earn a living. Once they can do that, they can educate themselves by reading and taking courses for the rest of their lives.
> they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority, that they stand up for what they believe in
And math and science teach you how to frame those questions. They enable you to evaluate the evidence that those authorities may be using. They show how to present new evidence or new models to update the existing knowledge.
In short, math and science addresses the issue of if two people have differing views, how can they state those views clearly (mathematics) and evaluate the correctness of those views in an objective manner (science).
The issue with our society isn’t that people aren’t questioning authority, it is that a lot of people are questioning, not in a quest for truth, but to be able to impose their view of the world on everybody else and become the authority. Without science and mathematics, all this questioning just devolves to demagoguery and questions of power and control. There are many groups that claim to “question” authority, but woe be to any member that question the group’s beliefs.
Science and mathematics allow people from different backgrounds with different beliefs to all speak a common language and have a common way of stating hypothesis and evaluating evidence so that we can learn more about our world. Engineering and technology allow us to use that knowledge to make other humans lives better.
It should be mentioned that the world's biggest problems are not really STEM oriented, but more about the humanities: political, cultural, legal, economic, etc. I don't think anyone is arguing directly against STEM education (as suggested by many of the defensive comments). Point is that pretending we have or will have shortage of qualified techies is a bit of a scam, often pitched to gain political/financial support for tech industry.
Agreed. I'm often stunned at the ethical vacuum that defines the tech industry, these days.
This has been personally heartbreaking, for me, as I was once a "starry-eyed dreamer" that the tech industry would rescue the world.
Instead, it has become an ethical wasteland that puts money above all else, to a vastly self-destructive level.
There is prior art in this. The finance industry was the same. After 1929, and several other disasters, since, the industry has come under increasing regulation.
Heartbreaking is the word for me too. I started out more in ops research and did well, but after the early 2000s dotcom bust thought it would be wise to pivot toward software. Mythical job of tomorrow as it were. Now surrounded by charlatans and it seems there is no escape!
I really don't understand why people are so hung up on the dichotomy of STEM versus the liberal arts education.STEM is an orphan without philosophy and history, and really ugly without the arts.
Growing up, kids need to be exposed to a variety of fields so that they art grounded/aware of the basics and can pick up further study when needed.
Yes maths and science are important, but so is philosophy, economics, history, arts, sports. They all help you understand the world around you. They help you understand yourself. Like Heinlein said, specialization is for insects. And school is really not the time to do that.
What is wrong is the way they are taught in almost every school. Kids are born curious and parents/schools have become very good at sucking that curiosity out of them to "make them a better citizen/workforce".
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadThat's only a problem when you have a monopoly supplier.
First:
> My objection is that all this talk about STEM is just the latest way to keep our schools focused exclusively on vocational training, to prepare our children for those mythological "jobs of tomorrow," jobs that may exist today
My first grader is going to college in 11 years. 11 years ago was 2009. The jobs were more or less the same. She’ll be graduated in 15. 15 years ago was 2005. The jobs were the same.
Second: the article conflates STEM with vocational training. It’s not. It’s an alternative framework to the “liberal arts education.” Even if the “jobs of tomorrow” are different, a STEM education will prepare kids for it better than a liberal arts education. The idea that a "liberal arts education" is the "all purpose flour" of education is obsolete. It's an artifact of the culture of western aristocrats.
> No, the purpose of education in a democracy ought to be to prepare children for their role as citizens and that means that they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority, that they stand up for what they believe in, and that they understand that their contribution to the world cannot be measured in money
A STEM education is better for that too! Citizens who cannot think about the world in numeric and statistical terms are not prepared to understand it, or the complex choices facing them.
> I did not enter the teaching game to prepare young children for their role in the economy
Teachers are deeply confused about their role. They're public employees who are hired to prepare kids for the work force because that is what taxpayers pay them to do. We don't spend $1 trillion a year on public education to have teachers indoctrinate kids on their philosophical and political views. (Now that I have my own kids in school, I understand why my mom, moving to the US from an Asian country 30 years ago, was so befuddled by the education I was receiving.)
Schools in East Asia, alongside pushing STEM topics are still also vehicles for pushing the philosophical and cultural views of the state through the teachers and curriculum, so I'm not sure why this is befuddling as such.
For a concrete example see Chinese medium schools in Malaysia, where it's not just about them being ostensibly better at teaching math or other STEM topics, but about Chinese language as a proxy for Chinese culture and values.
Schools in the US, at least in theory, don’t teach the philosophical and cultural views of the society. This is a concession to the fact that the US is a multi-cultural society, so teaching values as such would be inappropriate. Kids therefore get some instruction in US history, civics, and government, but you can get through the whole sequence without learning anything about Christianity or Western Europe.
That in itself is teaching values. From kindergarten and up, American schools teach students that diversity is a great thing, and we're all equal, and it's what makes America so special. It's something we're taught to be aware of and cherish. That's something loads of other countries' public education systems don't teach at all, and some even teach the opposite.
How a country teaches values isn't obvious to someone raised within that country. It's just thought to be common sense.
I think the "liberal" in "liberal arts" is throwing you off :-P.
Math, stats, and logic is very much part of a liberal arts education.[1] So are life and natural sciences, philosophy, history, geography, and political science. I would imagine learning all of these would make you a better informed citizen.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Modern_...
> In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process. Re-christening the old trivium with a new and more ambitious name: Studia humanitatis, and also increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, and added to them history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics), with a new emphasis on poetry as well.
In practice, modern “liberal arts” programs often dispense with logic, math, and empirical science. Again, from your link:
> For example, the core courses for Georgetown University's Doctor of Liberal Studies program cover philosophy, theology, history, art, literature, and the social sciences.
More fundamentally, it’s insufficient to throw in a few courses on math that everyone quickly forgets. Math, science, and logic should be the basic foundation for cultivating children’s world view, not literature, philosophy, or social studies.
For example, consider how kids learn about history. They read stories, mostly focused on individuals. But that’s not the only way to learn history. I took a class at Georgia Tech in the history of science, which looked at the impact on society of various technological advances. History education doesn’t quantify anything. But we have lots of data. What was the GDP per capita of ancient Egypt versus Mesopotamia? What are quantitative indicators we can use to help put those societies into context and compare them with ours? what was the infant mortality rate in India before and after British colonization? What were the demographic trends in Mandate Palestine prior to the creation of Israel?
Where are you getting any of this from? What in the world are you talking about?
Since you mentioned Georgia Tech, I looked up their liberal arts programs at the undergraduate and graduate level.
Selected undergrad majors: Computational Media (computer science and design)[1], Economics (pretty mathy, check out the curriculum[2]), Global Economics and Languages (ditto [3]).
Selected graduate majors: Digital Media (tons of programming and design work[4]), Human Computer Interaction (tech-y by definition [5]), Economics, Infosec [6]. Seems like any of those degrees would require plenty of "logic, math, and empirical science".
But then one might say, "Georgia Tech is an engineering school. Of course their liberal arts stuff is going to be tinged with rigor. But them lefty, coastal, liberal hotbeds can't reason their way out of a paper bag."
So I looked up Wellesley College, one such institution. They offer majors in such soft disciplines as Astronomy, Physics, Astrophysics, Biochemistry, Math, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, Geosciences, to name a few.[7] They graduate students in these majors every year.
I don't think you understand the breadth of disciplines that a liberal arts education can encompass. There are liberal arts degrees attained by taking the bare minimum of math, or science classes and then there are liberal arts degrees such as geology that have plenty of hard (haha!) science and math behind them.
> consider how kids learn about history. They read stories, mostly focused on individuals. But that’s not the only way to learn history. I took a class at Georgia Tech in the history of science, which looked at the impact on society of various technological advances
What does a class you took at Georgia Tech have to do with how kids are taught history in school? They are different things. Kids being taught history poorly doesn't invalidate the importance of the subject. Kids are taught math and science poorly too.
Advanced studies in history do explore questions of the sort you raised.
> Math, science, and logic should be the basic foundation for cultivating children’s world view, not literature, philosophy, or social studies.
I think philosophy and social studies are just as important as math and science, and maybe literature is less important. First off, logic has its roots in philosophy[8]. Social studies such as history, civics, and geography are important for a well-informed citizenry. Economics is pretty handy. You may scoff at literature as being useless, but it forms the basis of the entertainment industry - plenty of money there.
1. https://www.iac.gatech.edu/academics/undergraduate/bs/cm
2. https://www.iac.gatech.edu/academics/undergraduate/bs/econom...
3. https://www.iac.gatech.edu/academics/undergraduate/bs/geml
4. https://dm.lmc.gatech.edu/program/courses-2/
5. http://www.mshci.gatech.edu/program/about
6. https://www.iac.gatech.edu/academics/graduate
7.
From wikipedia: "There is no formal definition of liberal arts college".
Here's someone else explaining better than I can: "A bachelor's degree in liberal arts means that the courses you take will be in general areas of study such as philosophy, mathematics, literature, art history, or languages, rather than in applied or specialized fields."
If you think that Biochemistry is a "liberal arts degree" then you've really misunderstood what the above poster was talking about. Biochemistry is a specialized field, and no one would consider that a liberal arts subject.
If it helps, you want to be looking towards degrees like: psychology, business, literature, arts, sociology, women's studies, languages, history, political science... Does this mean these degrees will never touch math? By no means! But it's foolish to think the level of mathematical and technical rigor would be similar to a degree in, say, Physics.
Generally speaking, even a Physics student will take some liberal arts classes as electives, as part of a "liberal arts education"; what we might call well-rounded. But while the physics student might read a few books and find it interesting, and keep that as part of them for the rest of their life... it's generally not the case that a student of Fine Arts is going to take Calculus and occasionally wistfully perform derivatives.
Who runs the world? Not STEM people. Most politicians have a legal and/or liberal background. They may also have a background in STEM - particularly likely in Europe, less so in the US - but you get nowhere in politics without studying and understanding foundational liberal arts skills such as rhetoric, persuasion, and public debate.
The idea that liberal arts majors spend their entire time writing on essentially useless activities - like post-structural critiques of famous literature - is hilariously naive.
Some liberal arts academics do indeed do this, but that's because the liberal arts have pure and applied elements. Just like STEM. And STEM academics also spend their time on wildly impractical theoretical pastimes.
But at the applied end, the liberal arts run the planet. They don't keep the lights on - engineers do that - but they set the policy goals and define the political, economic, moral, and philosophical orthodoxies that virtually everyone conforms to, whether or not they're consciously aware of it.
In my country most politicians have a liberal background. Also nuclear power is illegal here. Coincidence? I think not.
I’m skeptical that attainment of political power is easily attributed to a good liberal arts education. I think desire for power, some intelligence, and a relaxed relationship with principles go a long way. Well-crafted rhetoric...eh.
I suspect that the dichotomy isn't so much 'STEM vs Arts' but 'Accountable vs Unaccountable'. Most STEM fields are accountable to reality and future employers, and law is similarly accountable to rival scholars of law and employers of new lawyers. That makes law a rather noteworthy outlier in the liberal arts.
*in western countries
Those fields are in neighborhood of STEM more than old "liberal arts" standard of language, foreign language, art (painting or music) and history. (Note: no ethics or philosophy.)
Do you know the M in STEM stands for 'Mathematics'?
ok, yes, STEM students study a little bit liberal arts
> generally not the case that a student of Fine Arts is going to take Calculus
But now you're asking a liberal arts student to study Calculus and derivatives, which are not easy topics and not something that useful in day to day life.
This is a blatantly double standard in your argument. Few STEM students go that deep in liberal arts to the "level of Calculus". It's like asking a STEM student to read Kant.
If you want to add something useful to the mix, try law, ethics (technically a subset of philosophy), logic (as analysis and rationality, manipulation) and acting. Group work can be exercised in any field, therefore including basic management.
How? I can see how calculus is used in quantitative finance, but double-entry bookkeeping predates the invention of calculus.
Calculus is a high school subject where I live, at least single variable calculus, it's not that hard.
Many of the liberal arts electives I could choose from (as a physics major) were foundational requirements in that major. For example, in a literature class I took, the instructor was surprised many of us had not also taken Literary Criticism 101.
On the other hand, an English major friend of mine was able to take a physics course nicknamed "Physics for Poets", where rounding g to 10m/s/s was acceptable.
I think you're missing my point. In the North American definition of the term, a physics degree is also a liberal arts degree. Physics is a natural science. North American liberal arts colleges offer physics degrees.
Liberal arts education is in contrast to applied or technical educations. For example, aerospace engineering, which is physics applied to a specialized domain.
Your definition of liberal arts seems to be "anything that doesn't involve too much math." Which is a weird kind of snobbery. (I'm speaking as an engineer btw).
Absolutely fundamentally disagree, and this is from someone that's studied primarily maths at every stage of education.
I'd much rather people were taught and viewed the world through the lens of literature and philosophy than maths and science. The world has too many 'DAE STEM???' 'OMG SCIENCE!!!!111' STEMlords already.
You might have to track children according to ability, which is unpalatable to some. You might also have to have a revolution in the art of teacher education and practice, which is probably impossible due to the entrenched interests.
~ STEM Professor.
Now that's depressing.
> It's an artifact of the culture of western aristocrats.
There are elements of truth in what you said. But liberal education is also the bedrock of western education and knowledge which includes STEM fields. Every stem field was created and advanced by those who came from "liberal arts education".
Also, liberal arts education has always included math and science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
Liberal arts education created the western world order. It's why the west is on top. It would be counterproductive to discard it. Perhaps we should just increase the share of STEM within the overall liberal arts education system?
Math and physics are solidly on the STEM side when people argue the merits of STEM vs liberal arts.
So instead of arguing semantics, understand what people mean. When they say "Don't study STEM, study liberal arts" what they mean is not "Don't study the more practical sides of STEM like engineering, study the liberal arts side of STEM like Maths", but instead "Don't study anything which requires more math than Algebra 1".
That's my point. I disagree with the assertion that STEM is separate from liberal arts education. Historically it hasn't been true. And it's not true today.
> So instead of arguing semantics, understand what people mean.
Not arguing semantics. I understand what people mean and I am disagreeing with them and I provided sources and historical proof.
> When they say "Don't study STEM, study liberal arts"
Who says don't study STEM, study liberal arts?
> but instead "Don't study anything which requires more math than Algebra 1".
You've built up an exaggeration of the side you are arguing against. That's not an honest portrayal of the issue at hand.
You can study both science/engineering/etc and history/philosphy/politics/etc. It's called getting a well rounded liberal arts education. The backbone of science, technology, engineering and math along with philosophy, history, politics, etc. My suggestion was increase the amount of "STEM" within the liberal arts education system we already have - particularly the technology and engineering. It's not an either-or issue that people like to portray it as.
The article we are commenting on.
> My objection is that all this talk about STEM is just the latest way to keep our schools focused exclusively on vocational training
The guy is a preschool teacher. Let's be honest, he's not really in the 'teaching game' anyway.
Take your view of the author's lack of meaningful credentials regarding teaching to its logical conclusion...we ought to not have any classes except the final ones, so no math education, except for the last most advanced calculus courses, because math before that isn't really in the 'teaching game'.
You can immediately see how abrupt and flawed that approach would be. If anything, the greatest care is needed in the first steps.
Speaking of college... Unlike for real teachers, only half of public preschool programs require any sort of degree or qualification, and this guy works for a private preschool, which often have no requirements at all.
Indeed, after a difficult search, I found that he actually never finished college [2]. So yeah, he's basically just a random guy with no official background in education. So who the fuck cares about his opinion about STEM in education?
He got the job because his daughter went to the preschool. That's it. That's not a qualification.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/315074/percentage-of-pre...
[2] https://artfulparent.com/teacher-tom-on-child-led-learning/
Imagine how are you going to make them understand abstract concepts when they have no idea about them.
They have very small attention span to what adults consider important things.
I did music, foreign languages, philosophy, art, business studies in a public high school in Australia. These subjects, obviously, had a state wide curriculum. I was not indoctrinated by my teachers.
> No, the purpose of education in a democracy ought to be to prepare children for their role as citizens and that means that they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority, that they stand up for what they believe in, and that they understand that their contribution to the world cannot be measured in money.
This is indoctrination into a specific value system.[1] None of this is necessary to teach kids math or writing, logical analysis, data analysis, or even the functioning of our government.
[1] As an Asian immigrant, it’s also largely not the value system I want to teach my kids. I’d rather have kids learn to respect authority, to respect the wishes and preferences of the majority of people around them, to be very considerate of how their actions affect others, to keep their heads down and work hard, to fully understand why things are the way they are before advocating for change, and that their function as people is to contribute to economy and thus the society and get a well paying job so they can support their own families.
I strongly suspect that for most Americans, or at least a large swath of Americans, the values they want to teach their kids hew closer to the above than “question authority.”
I understand what you're saying about conflicting value systems, but you're flat-out wrong that what the author describes is indoctrination. The key word from the definition is "uncritically".
Here's the key part of what you've quoted:
> they learn to think for themselves, that they ask a lot of questions, that they question authority,
All that is the opposite of "accepting uncritically".
At the college level I think the colleges themselves are to blame for all the animosity towards the liberal arts, they've priced themselves completely out of the market. Not too long ago it wasn't a big deal to spend four years getting a liberal arts degree and then going on to an MBA, Law or sales or even a STEM field to make a living afterwards. That's exactly what the author's wife of this article did by the sounds of it. Now that path might mean tens of thousands of dollars of debt just for the BA, so the pressure is on to make that investment worth while and for many it's not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Holland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs (admittedly he dropped out)
Some universities deal with this demand by offering a "Certificate" or something equivalent in tech for students so that they can learn the fundamentals even though they're from a liberal arts (or other background, but have a degree). Even going back like 50 years, my father studied liberal arts but was offered an opportunity to do an advanced degree in computer science, provided he completed core courses (in additions to the ones he'd already done).
I suppose my point is that this may not be as rare as it seems, and is increasingly common as a BA becomes a dime a dozen (although not intrinsically valueless) and the growth in tech jobs continues (for now).
This is a shibboleth. A functional democracy, needs kids who know how to think in terms of statistics, cause and effect, and logic versus fallacy.
It seems that Teacher Tom is missing the point about early STEM education (this seems particularly worrying given that he is a teacher). The point is not to teach preschoolers how to use, for example, TensorFlow so that they can develop deep learning models (who are predict if this would have any relevance for the future?).
Instead, the point is to help kids to develop a background in math, physics, chemistry, etc. whose basic foundations haven't changed in the fundamental way in the past 50 years. In particular, developing an understanding of math takes time, and seems likely to required for many jobs for tomorrow. Would Teacher Tom contest the point that math will be necessary for jobs of the future? Perhaps Teacher Tom's object was just to write a provocative article to generate blog traffic, (fair enough) but the argument presented in the blog does not seem very well reasoned.
Guess who teaches our kids?
My sarcasm detector may be off so if it was, please forgive me.
Why must it continue to be that way?
It's possible we must expect and accept that children from broken, impoverished, or abusive homes will just be, well, screwed in comparison to their better off peers.
Can't we instead look for a better way?
- Improve the funding and education of our public schools (particularly by the decoupling of property taxes being the primary source of school funding).
- Take a hard look at our current minimum wage and find a way to make it easier for hard working people to make ends meet, allowing them more time to nurture and teach their children.
Giving up on hard luck children is by extension giving up on our societies future. To me at least, thats simply untenable.
I don't think mediocre is unacceptable. But, I do think the country's achievement systems do. And yes, we should look for better systems.
I don't think funding will improve the education system much, unfortunately. Probably we would be better off spending that money reducing the number of single parent families. (Somehow...)
On the other side, we all would benefit from good quality education for everybody. I mean proper benefit for whole mankind for generations, golden age and whatnot.
Currently, in many places which prefer predatory mindset (looking at you too, US), its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, the higher I am above everybody else the better I am off. Well, not really if you actually want to live in society. Otherwise you end up walled in your luxury home like in South Africa, with private security, but afraid to go out after dark, carrying guns everywhere, high crime rate etc.
I agree that we all benefit from a high quality education for the children.
I think you're describing 'Bellum omnium contra omnes'. And yes, we seem to be heading in that direction in much of the world.
In case, we would seek to have a macro-scale program delivering exceptional results to all of our current participants.
Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.
Depends what you mean by wiser. It really seems we absolutely don't have the same definition.
> Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.
So what? Nowhere did I say it would deliver equally exceptional results to all the participants.
Just that it's goal would be to deliver exceptional results to all current participants, compared to the means of the rest of the world and all of human history.
How does your inevitable bell curve contradict or invalidate any of it? How does having internal variations invalidate any of it?
It is worth noting that a world where children from broken, impoverished (etc.) homes are not disadvantaged is a world where one cannot advantage one's own kids.
There is of course a strong argument for significant societal investment in keeping children from broken homes from raising broken homes of their own.
Please don't take this as an argument against taking steps to improve education and opportunity[2], only that anything approaching true flatness would represent a massive disruption of social order and motivation.
[1] Literal.
[2] I agree with most of your suggestions; educated persons are valuable.
This is such an uncreative, broken, zero-sum, awful line of reasoning. One can shift up both the bottom and top rungs of a scale simultaneously, so that there would still be advantaged kids despite there being fewer children from broken/impoverished homes.
In fact, such a thing has been done but not necessarily for morally good reasons either. This uplift is exactly what was seen when schools were desegregated in the South and the bottom (black schools) were uplifted: the emergence of private expensive religious schools that were effectively white-only, raising the uppermost advantaged bar as well.
But I don't think there are easy fixes, because there's also intergenerational social mobility - working class parents going without luxuries to send their children to a better school etc. It's very tough to give poor-but-ambitious families means to improve their lot over a long time without already-wealthy families monopolizing those opportunities.
See recent US and UK politics for examples. Although perhaps like attracts like, so if there's enough dysfunction around at all levels you get a politics of brokenness with dysfunctional broken leaders appealing to broken supporters.
But, that doesn't mean we can't move the bar for all students upward. We can look for ways to ensure the average student learns more, or has more tangible skills, or whatever else we want.
The rising tide floats all boats, yada yada yada.
I think children should get a proper education formally and practically on how to balance and how to meet the political (in the sense that these are needs that are solved at the societal / collective level) needs of a group of people. It doesn't have to be a large group; along the lines of the entire school or talking about the needs of a district or city would do. I think that such education would go a long way to help people understand what is important in governance, and be more resistant to political ideology that is harmful to these things.
> Any rigid structure of governance that is focused on anything else will eventually fail.
I don't think we are contradicting each other. The need to feel free and have flexibility in certain aspects of governance is a political need that needs to be balanced. An education in governance should address this aspect so that citizens are more tuned-in to abuses of office and institutions that infringe on freedoms that most citizens have not chosen to yield to the government.
Even though we were not contradicting each other, I do not completely agree with this.
> In a government, the primary need is that the people feel free, feel like they're not being ordered around by a dictator, that they can have fun or do what they want or set their own rules.
I think you recognize that this freedom here is quite qualified. The freedom to do what we want or set our own rules certainly need to be qualified at least around to the extent that they do not cause negative consequences to other people. Where the exact boundaries are are always shifting depending on the specific circumstances and population, and this is why various needs need to be balanced by government; i.e. the extent of this freedom is being balanced by other societal needs.
Hence I would say that prima facie, a primary objective is a balance of freedom and well-being of the citizenry, with neither need superior over the other.
On the other hand,
> [the freedom to] set their own rules
may sometimes be done most efficiently and reliably through governmental institutions, using government institutions to conduct certain self-funded voluntary programs.
There are plenty of governments who have never felt that to be a primary, secondary, or even tertiary need. 'Plenty' here refers to an overwhelming majority of governments, through an overwhelming majority of recorded history.
> Any rigid structure of governance that is focused on anything else will eventually fail.
Are you basing this on the brief, half-century window of human history where liberal democracies governed something between a quarter, and a third of the world's population?
When I look at human history, it seems to be that despotism is the norm, and liberal democracy is a quirky, novel fad, that may fizzle out, just like acid-washed jeans, and pet rocks did.
Teaching children how to organize to solve their own problems would be antithetical to the incentives of any normal school’s administration. Children who can self-organize to oppose them are a threat. If people wanted children to learn how to organize, be capable and be self-efficacious democratic schools like Summerhill or Sudbury would be vastly more popular. They don’t. They want childcare that teaches children to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told.
They certainly don’t teach that. Kids who can’t sit down and shut up are given free reign to disrupt everyone else.
A power not exercised is still relevant insofar as it can be.
I would make a simple criteria: if you are a net taxpayer, you get to vote. If you are a net loss to the government, you don't get to vote.
If people have control over their circumstances, then they will be able to arrange their life in such a way that they can enable their voting power and vote responsibly.
This could be accomplished by taking a voluntary test based on free reading materials, or by earning a grade on free classes made available online and in community colleges and perhaps high schools.
Your grade then decides how much your vote counts. Your vote impact score might scale your vote linearly (0 to 1), or it could decide how much to augment a baseline of, let's say, 1.0, where the max augment is to add another 1.0 for a max of 2.0.
I'm sure there are lots of ways this might be done. The main point is to encourage voters to be better informed and more fair. Another goal would be to counteract mass media manipulators who spew disinformation and manipulate the underinformed.
Until we can somehow accomplish (especially) the latter, America will sink ever deeper into a political system governed by anger and stupidity.
When I hear these stats like these, I think about the bell curve of human ability. When you put it in those terms, the bottom 20% of people have IQs lower than 88. So it becomes unsurprising that they may not be all that up on the branches of government, especially given the irrelevance to their day-to-day existence.
Political theory is useless at school. At best children would be totally lost in the plethora of ideologies without proper understanding of why people invented them. At worst they would be indoctrinated with the ideology, chosen by the government (usually the case).
What we really need to teach children is decision making and responsibility taking. School is to obsessed with learning the facts omitting scepticism and problem solving whatsoever. Kids are being taught recipes, not how to act when you don't know the right one.
Too many people don't know they have a vote.
My observations of preschoolers is that they are learning the rules of the universe. That means very hands on discovery of the practical side of how things work coupled with a vivid imagination and creativity. That sounds like STEAM to me.
When schools teach social and political subjects to young children they tend to simplify the subject to the point of not being true. Kids are not ready for nuance.
Well, leadership, but less leading via thought leadership and more via listening, arbitrating, and brokering compromises between conflicting wants and needs.
He is asking why focus on STEM more instead of art? The answer put forward by people is that there are more STEM jobs now. Will there be more STEM jobs tomorrow rather than artistic jobs? We don't know.
Kids have a limited learning time per day, so if you put more STEM time, then you take time from other subjects.
Even if you extend it to writing, making music, advertisements, taking pictures and making GUI.
Unlike these, mathematics (the M in STEM) is almost every other non-physical job that is not data entry. T is the remaining ones that are physical (mechanic, electrician, hydraulic). S covers additionally the teachers themselves, doctors and biologists who don't need as much math. Heck, even modern agriculture.
The remainder is probably building, some service works such as sales, nursing, care for small children, purely physical labor, parts of logistics, gardening and forestry.
Ironically for careers like banks which are now grad entry the requirements back then for a vocational track where 50% higher than it was for an entry level Bank job, I had to have 6 o levels and I had to do an extra 1/2 day a week for the first year to get technical drawing
But that is very difficult to train for.. cause abstract abilitys without direct application dont stick, unless you felt the pain.
Nice theory, and I agree wholeheartedly. It takes a special kind of teacher though to implement that against the push back of students ("what will this ever be good for?"), parents ("get our of your ivory tower and teach my kids skills that will give them a good job") and politicians ("we need more specialists and it must cost $0").
That would be easier if that pedagogical approach were the norm and vocational training the exception, but in addition to these three interest groups, such a teacher often also has to deal with other teachers who are not interested in a trouble maker colleague who may create additional work for them.
However
> Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke
I do! Math!
Machine learning:
Lin alg
Calc
Stat/prob
Programming: understanding math gives a leg up in understanding many of the ideas underlying.
The meta-skill that math teaches is also timeless: when you learn concept D, you need to have a very good mastery over concepts A, B and C.
In my psychology lectures there never was such a “concept dependency hell”.
So yea math.
Also writing and articulating yourself. A rhetoric class is also timeless (if given properly).
So yea... I could go on. I won’t but I will predict this:
If you learn how to sell
Learn how to play along
And learn math
Then those skills will immensely help you for some of the new jobs in the future.
Well, historically they have been more right than wrong. For millennia jobs were more or less constant (farming, the trades, commerce, mercenary, etc) so it was even very easy to predict. And for the best part of the industrial era, "more STEM" would be both easy to predict and an easy win. As would be "more office/services jobs" in the mid-20th century, and "more IT jobs" in the 80s and on. All of those existed as guesses and were correct. So where are those guesses that "have always been wrong"?
>Anyone who claims to know the specific skills required for the jobs of tomorrow is just blowing smoke.
That's also a bad argument. Nobody claims "specific skills".
A STEM education is not just some specific skills, it's a very wide range of skills, that have been useful to the best job positions for centuries.
Don't see that changing, unless widespread general AI (not the crap we have today, with task-oriented NN models) takes over most technical and scientific jobs renders poetry and painting and music playing the only jobs available to people. Which I don't see it happening in the next 50 years or so, if ever.
You need to discuss some sort of real curriculum. Or at least what changes you'd make to a current one.
http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/2018/12/those-mythologic...
But wait, there is more! He also wrote it 3 years ago. Nearly word-for-word identical.
http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/2017/11/when-democracy-s...
Self-plagarism is still plagarism.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/08/rotten-stem-how-t...
I would refer to these STEM subjects in this order instead, because thats how they depend: math, physics, chemistry and biology. MPCB does not sound as good though.
As for jobs they do not exist; only work exists, and you need to spend energy to do it.
One last thing, we need to have more female teachers in these subjects, since they are not trying to keep secrets.
Men keep secrets to get what they want, which mostly is women.
Is he suggesting here that public education is a scam? It doesn't seem so in the later paragraphs, and that's an extreme view to hold. Also the idea I don't think actually emerged as a way to fulfil national labour requirements. Condorcet, I think an early French pioneer in public education systems, seemed primarily concerned with equality, not creating labour supply.
And math and science teach you how to frame those questions. They enable you to evaluate the evidence that those authorities may be using. They show how to present new evidence or new models to update the existing knowledge.
In short, math and science addresses the issue of if two people have differing views, how can they state those views clearly (mathematics) and evaluate the correctness of those views in an objective manner (science).
The issue with our society isn’t that people aren’t questioning authority, it is that a lot of people are questioning, not in a quest for truth, but to be able to impose their view of the world on everybody else and become the authority. Without science and mathematics, all this questioning just devolves to demagoguery and questions of power and control. There are many groups that claim to “question” authority, but woe be to any member that question the group’s beliefs.
Science and mathematics allow people from different backgrounds with different beliefs to all speak a common language and have a common way of stating hypothesis and evaluating evidence so that we can learn more about our world. Engineering and technology allow us to use that knowledge to make other humans lives better.
This has been personally heartbreaking, for me, as I was once a "starry-eyed dreamer" that the tech industry would rescue the world.
Instead, it has become an ethical wasteland that puts money above all else, to a vastly self-destructive level.
There is prior art in this. The finance industry was the same. After 1929, and several other disasters, since, the industry has come under increasing regulation.
Growing up, kids need to be exposed to a variety of fields so that they art grounded/aware of the basics and can pick up further study when needed.
Yes maths and science are important, but so is philosophy, economics, history, arts, sports. They all help you understand the world around you. They help you understand yourself. Like Heinlein said, specialization is for insects. And school is really not the time to do that.
What is wrong is the way they are taught in almost every school. Kids are born curious and parents/schools have become very good at sucking that curiosity out of them to "make them a better citizen/workforce".