I found the comments in this post intriguing. I’m like the others with the post itself, however, not too happy with it.
I didn’t know what STEM stood for, so I looked it up: Science Technology Engineering Math.
I don’t know why education has to be divided into either/or with Math/Science and the Arts. They both benefit from the other. I would say Science benefits more from the arts than the other way around, but that’s just my take on it.
The comment on Darwin’s theory being used to justify power over others is spot on. I don’t think Darwin meant for it to be interpreted that way. Robert Shepherd asserts that Darwin saw all of us as interconnected, rather than adversaries as the social darwinists would have you believe. I believe it, too. That is one reason I became a vegetarian. I only went back to eating meat because I had gotten sick and was advised that i should eat meat. I think that we owe it to the animals who give their lives for us some respect. Factory farms do not do that. Once again, it’s following the golden rule of doing unto others as we would have done to us.
Another comment was striking:
Sharon
I think STEM is being oversold and that some skepticism is in order. Here is one personal story on top of those articles and the information provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
My daughter was very strong in math and ended up majoring in chemistry at a top-20 school. After college she was selected to be a paid intern in the research division of a successful pharmaceutical company. One year later she started in the PhD program for organic chemistry at a top University of California system school. STEM-speaking, this would all seem to paint a rosy picture for her future because she’s done everything right. Right?
But what she learned from working at the pharmaceutical company and from talking with other organic chemistry graduate students, was that much of the R&D in that particular STEM field is being increasingly outsourced to Asian countries. Not only that, but the pharmaceutical company was inclined to fill its labs with a large number of imported scientists (to save money). Some people have theorized that the reason for the current STEM push is to saturate the market with extremely educated scientists who then get stuck having to accept lower and lower wages.
In the STEM field of chemistry, American PhD graduates, even those from top universities, are not having an easy time finding work. These are people in their 20s who have been very, very self-disciplined about their schoolwork from the time they were in grade school. So, as far as our children’s futures go, pursuing any old STEM field does not guarantee success. But that is NOT what Arne Duncan or President Obama would have us all believe.
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Okay….here is someone who did everything right….and look what has happened to her. (working for Big Pharma aside….)
Note the comment on Boeing wanting people getting a well-rounded education so they can “think outside the box”. If it’s for airplanes, I don’t have a problem with it, but there’s just something wrong with teaching children better arts skills so they can find more creative ways….to kill people.
From the commenter Democracy:
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, examined carefully its specific claims. The Sandia researchers concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
“average performance of ‘traditional’ test takes on the SAT has actually improved over 30 points since 1975…”
* “Although it is true that the average SAT score has been declining since the sixties, the reason for the decline is not decreasing student performance. We found that the decline arises from the fact that more students in the bottom half of the class are taking the SAT than in years past…More people in America are aspiring to achieve a college education…so the national SAT average is lowered as more students in the 3rd and 4th quartiles of their high school classes take the test. This phenomenon, known as Simpson’s paradox, sows that an average can change in a direction opposite from all subgroups if the proportion of the total represented by the subgroups changes.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
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He/She goes on to mention an article in Columbia Journalism Review by Beryl Lieff Benderly. It’s really eye-opening to the myth of scarcity of math;/science majors. It’s not hard to question who is putting this myth out there and why….especially when they are bringing in foreign workers who will work for lower pay. Is the myth being created so that they can justify bringing in the foreign workers? It would appear that way.
From the article:
It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.
High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future.
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“When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.
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And this, which alludes to the point I was making yesterday on the ageism in the corporate world:
For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.
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I saw yet another blip the other day on the nooz of how many tech jobs are going unfilled because “there aren’t enough tech grads out there”….so now, after reading all of this, I realize they’re actually saying “there aren’t enough tech grads willing to work for minimum wage”.
And the whole debate on Science vs. Arts fails to include the argument for being well-rounded citizens who can think critically, analytically, with creativity of arts’ mindset. I think art that is unscripted allows one freedom of expression that translates into, for want of a better word, “looseness”. I think science is rigid where art is not (or shouldn’t be), and that translates into humanity’s acceptance of differences. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but there you go…
Eagle 