President Obama will visit Intel in Hillsboro, OR, this Friday morning, as part of an “Education Week” designed to advance the President’s agenda on education and innovation. During the visit, Intel will promote its STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program, a science- and math-heavy education program for K-12 students that’s intended to spark their interest in engineering and the sciences.
I am 100 percent for investing in education, including math and science. As an admittedly passionate student of the humanities, however, I have a serious bone to pick with our country’s near-exclusive emphasis on, well, science, technology, engineering and math as the most important (for some, seemingly the only) components of a good education.
Contrary to much popular rhetoric, churning out more engineers won’t solve the deep educational crisis we’re facing. If the fundamentals of our education system were solid, perhaps I could forgive this focus on math and science to the exclusion of all else. But we are graduating students who can scarcely read or write, inundating them with standardized tests and killing intellectual curiosity. Our very educational institutions themselves are anti-education. This problem is much larger than math and science, and yet we focus there as if it is our only hope. This attitude is woefully misguided, even dangerous.
In the United States, we live in a democracy, admittedly imperfect but a democracy nonetheless. And democracies require an educated populace – one that is able to think independently and critically about complex issues – in order to thrive. Democracies require a basic grasp of history, an ability to understand ideas and trends, both in the context of culture and in relation to each other. They demand the capacity to entertain ideas without adopting them, to look at an issue from many different sides and make informed decisions. Democracies, in short, require a well-rounded education rich in history, philosophy, literature and language as well as the “hard” sciences. And therein lies the great failure of American public education.
We are not providing this wealth of knowledge to our students, nor will we if we focus our resources only on math and science. In fact, if we do focus only on the latter, to the detriment of all else, we will lose even the best aspects of these hard disciplines, for true intellectual curiosity comes from someplace deeper than the pages of a physics textbook. It comes from those regions of the soul where poetic language reigns, where poets, philosophers and physicists alike go to explore the deep mysteries of the human spirit, the rumblings of our consciousness that cannot be quantified and plotted like so many dots on a graph. We cannot quell aesthetic and ontological wonder in the classroom without quelling some aspects of scientific wonder, as well.
I do not intend to belittle math, science, engineering or technology. I value them deeply. Indeed I agree that the world needs more engineers, but we need engineers who read Plato, who study the Enlightenment and ancient Chinese history. We need to make a greater place for the veritable universe of education that falls outside the realm of the hard disciplines. Programs like STEM are absolutely vital, but we need them for the humanities and social sciences, as well.
If our national discourse on education continues to focus almost exclusively on math, science and engineering, we risk a great deal. We risk, ironically, the very global competitiveness we’re striving to reclaim through our emphasis on these disciplines. We risk our wholeness as thinking, feeling, emoting human beings. And if our citizens cannot think critically and entertain complex ideas, we risk nothing less than our democracy itself.
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Excellent explanation, Robin. Glad to see I’m not the only one thinking about it.
Sam Florman wrote a book on this very theme:
http://www.amazon.com/Civilized-Engineer-Samuel-C-Florman/dp/0312025599/ref=pd_sim_b_1
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I am an engineer who reads Plato and who has also read Mr. Florman’s book, but I find it very difficult to agree with the line of thought in this post (even though I agree with the conclusion).
For starters, you should clarify what you mean. Do you think engineers should be required by universities to study Plato, Kant, Dickinson, etc while taking engineering courses? Or simply that they should, some time in their life, acquaint themselves with these great writers and their thoughts?
The distinction is important because the former places the burden on educational institutions, while the latter places the burden on individuals. Personally, I read (and enjoyed) Plato prior to going to college, but during college I simply didn’t have much time for reading material unrelated to mathematics, science, or engineering. Engineering, unlike many disciplines in the humanities, is a highly specialized set of fields, each increasing in specialty and narrowing in focus as you become more proficient. By its very nature, acquiring proficiency in any branch of engineering requires you to focus more intensely on that particular area of study, and the difficulty involved in most of these branches simply does not permit any but the most gifted students the time to study literary works of historical or aesthetic significance. Broadening the education of students in technical fields simply cannot be done without adding additional time to the process of earning a degree in these fields (which would add considerable expense, as well) or reducing the quality of the technical education itself.
You seem to be arguing from a set of (frankly rather naive) ideals without ignoring the real costs you are proposing to impose on millions of students. I agree that it would be wonderful to have a society of technical and non-technical people all well-versed in classic literature and poetry, but this is simply not realistic. Your implicit assumption that college should be about creating well rounded individuals is contradicted by the reality of college. Students go to college for various reasons, sometimes not that clearly defined, but attending college primarily to expand ones mind has always been the privilege of the wealthy, and that kind of system simply doesn’t scale. Most students go to college because their prospects for future employment are better if they have a degree of some sort. And it is much easier to measure the economic value of engineering knowledge than literary knowledge, so it should not be too surprising that taxpayer money is directed disproportionately towards those things that give a clearer ROI to the taxpayers.
Your perception of intellectual curiosity also displays a degree of ignorance that is unnerving. Intellectual curiosity is not, as you claim, the exclusive privilege of poets. It CAN be found on the pages of a physics textbook; if you have never been able to do so then that is unfortunate, but if you study physics at a high enough level you will see beauty that most ordinary people never imagine. Read anything by Richard Feynman to get an idea of what I mean by this. This quote will give you an idea: “To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature … If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.”
There is a lot more to the hard sciences than “dots on a graph.” Believe it or not, students of the sciences are studying beauty, but it is probably not the kind that you are familiar with. It is a cold and austere beauty that transcends mere humanity and gives faint glimpses of universal truths and principles. I think that a lot of humanities students would be better off if they studied mathematics and physics. But I’d be called crazy if I suggested that English majors should be forced to study differential equations or electrodynamics.
I enjoy reading Plato, but I do it on my own time. I don’t ask the public to pay for me to be intellectually enriched in ways that will probably not benefit anyone but myself. College, for most people, is a place to acquire economically valuable skills. Intellectual enrichment is a fine goal as well, but it should be done on one’s own dime. Asking others to fund one’s own curiosity is both arrogant and impractical.
John, I’m an engineer and one of those who have actually, say, “felt” the secret beauty living behind funny numbers and intricate equations, the brilliant theorems and their simple demostrations. So, I know what you mean. And I think you’re missing a point here.
What Robin says about the society as a whole, holds true at a much smaller scale. What makes a good democracy, makes a good individual. Your capacity to appreciate Plato, or Seneca, or Socrates, it’s not the aftereffect of your ability to grasp the elegance of Feynman’s QED but its very cause. Confronting those thinkers’ ideas (and the logic, and the history, and the societies behind them) or reading their prose, all contributed to building the substrate that now feeds your quest for, or your mere understanding of, beauty.
But this is still not the point. You (rather harshly) conclude that reading Plato “will probably not benefit anyone but myself” and that “asking others to fund one’s own curiosity
is both arrogant and impractical” and this says it all. Apparently, the difference on our hypotheses of what a good education system should produce is sharp but you don’t need to go far to see where it comes from, it’s embedded in the term itself. A simple lookup on a dictionary will show you that “education” is “the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction” whilst “educate” is the act of giving “intellectual, moral, and social instruction to someone”. I think that students should be educated, you think that they should be given an education. The implications are obvious, the most fundamental being that in one case we will end up with better employees, in the second with better citizens. Call me naive, but I still trust individuals more than policies when it comes to building a better society.
Ah, and curiosity wrote more theorems than knowledge.
In Alfred Angelo Attanasio’s science fiction novel ‘Solis’ there was a breed of robots built for specific tasks, known as Andrones. Each of them was programmed with the practical knowledge and desire to carry out the roles they were made for.
However, each also had a ‘contra-parameter program’, which was, in layman’s terms, a hobby. They were programmed to be fascinated by something that had nothing to do with their job, like music or anthropology. Their creators gave them these arbitrary programs because they wanted them to be not mere tools, but people.
Flesh and blood students don’t seem to be receiving the same courtesy.
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