This is a great line about John Dewey.
In fact, he believed in liberal education. This is something that has largely been abandoned in the modern debate about education. Now it is all about how we can create more STEM graduates, as if all we need is better technology and the rest of our culture can just rot.
Of course this attitude extends from the plutocratic focus of our society, but it has been fully imbibed by nearly everyone so it’s hard to see, much less question.
STEM is non-threatening (as it has no ideology, nor the real possibility of one) so that is the main reason it is championed – that, and it leads directly to profits for those already wealthy.
The humanities, however, are dangerous to the elites so there is much propaganda about their uselessness and soft-headedness.
Funny, though, I bet if you ask people what the best time they’ve had in their lives, the vast, vast majority of those experiences would be pegged firmly in the realm of the humanities.
But we’ve chosen what kind of society we will have, and that is a faux laissez faire fascistic dystopia.
This whole STEM thing is a nonsensical construction. It’s a re-hash of the millennia-old “quadrivium” thing, but this time with the politesse of not directly berating the humanities as “trivial.” The idea that STEM is the key that unlocks remunerative opportunities is misguided and will inevitably set some people up for bitter disappointment. Of the four disciplines glommed together in this artificial construct, sombunall technology and engineering disciplines are marketable, while science and mathematics, to the extent that they are people’s livelihood, are academic careers and subject to the same PhD glut as the humanities. Generation X and younger were never given the memo about the Sputnik-inspired bump up in math/science funding/professorships being strictly for the baby boom generation. There’s also a lot of promotion by the education policy wonks of the skilled trades, community colleges, etc. There’s some truth that a generation or two of youths were brainwashed with artificially high expectations concerning their prospects in the degreed professions, or in the kinds of corporate salaried positions generally occupied by college graduates. While I expect demand to be stronger in the skilled trades than in most university-educated lines of work, I also expect demand to far exceed supply there, as a lot of people (perhaps including myself) will be following up a toilet-paper BS degree with some kind of practical training.
Elevating STEM to the only valid pursuit in life is fundamentally odd in really deep ways that I’m still untangling. It’s like saying that the tools are more important than the creation. STEM is a tool to get to something else, or at least it should be.
STEM, like all human pursuits, is a valid one and I am glad people enjoy occupations in that field. But the near-deification of those fields and those who pursue them — at least rhetorically, but (definitely) not financially — is like saying that the screwdriver is fundamentally better than the car it helped construct, the paintbrush more interesting and more valuable than the masterpiece it created.
Part of this enforced attitude (via propaganda) distills from what I wrote in my post. But some of it comes from the arrogance present in those fields, where the graduates therein (especially in physics/engineering) believe they are better than everyone else because they believe they are innately smarter.
All of this leads to the idea that STEM is valid in and only of itself, should be driving society, rather than society determining what we need and what would actually help us all lead better lives, and then going from there.
We have it all backwards.