Improving Public Education

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Would emphasizing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects improve public education?

STEM advocates think it would. They think STEM subjects naturally compel students to make decisions based on data and evidence, analyze and solve problems using creativity, and test the solutions they come up with.

Advocates are pretty sure that all of this is better than students making decisions with neither data nor evidence, allowing problems to go unanalyzed and unsolved, and proposed solutions to go untested.

Advocates also think all these improved decision-making practices will be applicable to various career fields that students might go into in the future.

Part of this enthusiasm for STEM education comes from the perception that the vast majority of future jobs are going to be in STEM fields. Some government leaders believe that people who don’t have STEM skills in the future are going to be SOL.

STEM-INTENSIVE VISION OF THE FUTURE

This STEM-intensive vision of the future worries the people who worry about education. Educators worry partly because they are under the impression that a lot of people really suck at STEM skills. They think the public will continue to suck at STEM unless educational interventions are made and stat. Professional worriers also worry because girls typically shy away from STEM careers. Girls don’t seem to have a positive perception of STEM careers and/or themselves. These worries are common among around the globe.

Students are also, at least sometimes, enthusiastic about STEM and its possibilities. One of the attractive features of STEM education, from a student’s point of view, is that it can increase a student’s sense of competence and confidence. The core method of teaching STEM subjects involves students trying different things and seeing what happens. Trying stuff is pretty much the normal way that children approach the world and it makes them feel competent and confident to do it.

Trying stuff is, ironically enough, greatly discouraged in the type of public education that people of my generation grew up with. Trying different things in essence pushes boundaries. Adults are typically keen on boundaries for children to keep them safe or get them to grow up the ‘right’ way. Put another way, adults fear children’s capacity to do and try all kinds of dangerous and not that dangerous things. STEM education holds out the tantalizing possibility that some of the natural experimentation that is typical of an inquiring child’s mind will flourish again.

The optimistic hope is that all the experimentation will lead to adults who are better able to adapt to an uncertain future. Adults who will land on their feet when capitalism pulls the rug out of from underneath them in one of its periodic cycles of unemployment. STEM, it is hoped, will allow these individuals to rise above a vicious economic system in triumph, bending it to their will as they solve problems with analytic abandon.

Part of the idea is also that people will be able to apply their STEM skills to non-STEM subjects and problems, such as those raised by social studies. A STEM-taught student can look at the treatment of native peoples for example, with the kind of analytical eye that rejects previous prejudices. STEM-trained people will consider problems in the kind of comprehensive way that rejects narrow thinking. They’ll become scientists who hypothesize and evaluate, acknowledge uncertainty, and accurately communicate the tentative nature of their conclusions. And we’ll all be the better for it!

That’s the hope at least.

Ah hah – alas, that won’t happen. People are perpetually looking for something to cure human nature. Something that will wipe out prejudice and ignorance and pettiness and the desire for certainty. The very fact that people keep embracing the latest cures for human nature is more or less exactly why there is no cure for human nature.

BUT WILL STEM IMPROVE PUBLIC EDUCATION?

But let’s not let that gloomy foray down the side road of human nature keep us from carefully considering whether or not public education can actually be improved by bandying about the acronym STEM and attempting to apply its principles.

Let’s start with the whole idea of improving anything. These days the improvement of anything always seems to harken back to the idea of the economy and economic benefit. Education improvements are justified by their presumed economic benefits.

In other words, people need to be STEM educated because the economy needs STEM-educated people. Public education damn well better start coughing them up if it is to be relevant to anything at all.

So, in a sense, the underlying question becomes – will STEM educated people be able to sell more chocolate chip cookies? How much STEM do we really need in the world? Does STEM make chocolate chip cookies actually better? Or would the world, and the economy, be better off if more people learned to bake their own cookies?

Chocolate chip cookies are just an example of course. The world is awash in technology, science, engineering, and really big problems. So it seems entirely natural that future-predicting educators would want to educate people for technology, science, engineering, and really big problems.

And a lot of the really big problems stem (no pun intended) from the kind of narrow (and not so scientific) thinking that STEM enthusiasts hope will be educated out of people. So it does not seem so far-fetched that STEM education has got to make things better for both the economy and the world.

I can’t fault anyone for wanting to place their bets on STEM.

THE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE FACTOR

But I also think the chocolate chip cookie factor is important. No matter how many science-y words and concepts and high paying jobs you dangle in front of people – people are still going to want chocolate chip cookies. And grandmas. And cuddly things. And comfort.

A high-tech economy still needs chocolate chip cookies. And the more high tech it is the more it needs homemade chocolate chip cookies and grandmas and cuddly things.

If there’s no place in education for homemade chocolate chip cookies (and increasingly there isn’t), something’s missing and that missing something is an important something. Would the consumers of today truly have put up with the ultra-processed food deserts that are currently killing them if they’d learned how to make homemade chocolate chip cookies in school? If they’d learned appreciation for the homemade as opposed to the mass-produced?

Could we improve public education if we made it a little less mass-produced?

Here’s the thing. A lot of parents think so. Homemade education (also known as home schooling) has become more and more prevalent over the last few decades. Whether or not that’s a good thing, it’s an understandable thing. Parents want more say in their children’s education than mass-produced education can typically provide them.

The thing about public education is that it is provided for the benefit of the public. This is a little different from being provided for the benefit of the people being educated. That seems strange to say but the entire public (presumably) pays for public education because education provides social benefits to everyone.

Benefits like keeping people out of prison (prisons being another thing that everyone pays for). Young men born in America are more than twice as likely to end up in prison if they haven’t finished high school. It’s in everyone’s interests to have a good public education system even if the education system isn’t ideal for a particular student.

It’s in everyone’s interests to have a public education system that serves the economy’s needs), even if that isn’t ideal for a particular person.

WHAT ABOUT HISTORY IN PUBLIC EDUCATION?

It’s also in everyone’s interests to have a public education system that teaches students about history, not just science. History tells us any number of important things, many of which we don’t realize as we are learning.

For example, history teaches us that people did things differently long ago. It teaches us different ideas, and that the world we live in has changed. Understanding that there are different versions of the world imparts a crucial sense of perspective to people who otherwise lack it.

History also teaches us that people long ago did and felt and thought about some things in ways that are eerily similar to the way we think and feel and act today. Understanding the continuity of human nature is another crucial element of perspective.

During the pandemic, I was simultaneously fascinated and incredulous as I watched (often seemingly educated) people on Twitter display absolutely no knowledge of human history. Harvard professors seemed to think that widespread illness had never occurred in a population before or that no measures had ever been taken before to restrict commerce or travel during a pandemic. Ordinary people were apparently convinced that people of the past never died from diseases because they spared the depredations of vaccines and Big Pharma.

The world of the past, in these people’s minds, was a paradise of freedom and health. Nothing bad ever happened before because mighty human immune systems conquered all without assistance. And the freedom to transmit disease led to glorious happiness everywhere.

If these people on Twitter are the products of public education, then public education needs a lot of improvement indeed.

So having a functional public education system is just the beginning, just the foundation. To improve public education, to make it better, public education needs to go beyond coughing up individuals trained to serve the needs of Google and Facebook. It ought to produce leaders as well.

And leadership is not the end result of simply knowing STEM subjects. Leadership skills develop when students are exposed to the variety of life and the varieties of ways to use their brains. Learning Old French is probably not going to stimulate the economy all that much. But learning ancient languages stimulates the brains of the people who learn them very much indeed. Learning any second language stimulates mental faculties that being monolingual just doesn’t.

THE HUMANTIES AND LEADERSHIP IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

Learning classical music is probably not a huge contributor to the economy either, unless we expect to see a large boom in the need for conductors. (Apparently, even if the need for orchestra conductors skyrockets, humanoid robots will be able to fill any gaps.

But like chocolate chip cookies, music and musicians are things that people need – things that are not just science-y or technology-driven. As Martin Luther King, Jr. argued long ago – the development of a critical intellect requires development of moral intellect as well.

MLK was a product of public schools, and although no one expects public schools to churn out Dr. King’s ilk on the regular, his life and his leadership are examples of what public education can aspire to. It can aspire to nurturing the kind of passion that King displayed in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington.

Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence didn’t stem (again, no pun intended) from his understanding of science. It stemmed from his understanding of people, from his emotional intelligence. Truly improving public education requires teaching emotional intelligence skills as well as technological skills.

And no matter what the students of tomorrow ending up doing, they will need to be able to deal with other people. A big part of dealing with other people, as Dr. King exemplified, is being able to convince them to listen to the things that are important to you.

Learning how to structure an argument to convince your parents of something is at least as valuable a skill as learning to structure an equation to convince your math teacher that you should pass.

Thus, truly improving public education may require some things that don’t seem so STEM-y. Maybe we need some archaic throwbacks to a non-technological time. For example, human brains remember things that they study from old-fashioned printed books better and more thoroughly than things they see on new-fashioned screens.

THE HUMAN BRAIN IS NOT HIGH TECH

Human brains naturally orient themselves in space. Brains still do that when learning. This comes from when people were hunter-gatherers. It’s crucially important for a hunter-gatherer to remember exactly where that tree with the edible fruit was located and how to find it again. A substantial part of the human brain is still devoted to spatial mapping and orientation.

So when a human brain reads something in a book, it automatically notes where on the page the important information is located. Because it automatically defaults to noting location. Stuff on screens moves. You scroll and it moves up and down. The human brain automatically says to itself, well that is moving information and therefore unreliable and subject to change and I have no interest in remembering it.

This is not necessarily stupid or old-fashioned on the part of the brain. A lot of information presented on screens is unreliable and subject to change and probably not worth remembering.

But the things you do want people to remember should be presented in some sort of unchanging format. This helps the brain understand the information’s reliability and importance. Printed materials are an obvious way to present unchanging material but so are other three-dimensional forms of imparting information.

This is where STEM can shine. Experiential learning, such as designing and making something tangible, automatically takes place in a location. And because it takes place as an experience, complete with emotions such as suspense and frustration, students naturally retain memories of what they learned from it.

Independent and student-led learning also improve public education when they are implemented. Young people learn more naturally from their peers and by trying things independently. In a sense, the role of public education, in an ideal world, would be to impose some sort of order on the things that students are naturally learning.

The key to improving public education therefore may not lie so much in what subjects exactly are taught, but how they are taught. Are the subjects taught in an orderly, structured manner so that the student learns how to learn? Are the subjects taught in such a way that a student can see how they all fit together? Are students being introduced to general ideas that can help them connect the various things they learn? More importantly, how much of what is being taught are students actually understanding?

SCHOOL ATMOSPHERE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

Improving public education at least in the US may also be a matter of improving the atmosphere. The United States spends a lot of money on police in schools. At the risk of sounding like the old person that I am, there were no police in school when I was a kid. We may have had problems, and we had plenty of them, but at least one thing we didn’t have to worry about was an atmosphere of being literally policed instead of educated.

Police have become so entrenched in schools that dislodging will be an adjustment that takes time. But it would be a money-saving adjustment that would, if done carefully, improve public education.

The controversial part of all this, these days, is that in order to learn, students need some elements of general knowledge. And the adults in the country, divided as they are by a fragmented media landscape that seeks only to monetize division for the enrichment of a few, don’t agree on what constitutes a fact anymore.

The adults don’t agree on values, facts, statements, events, or conditions. This puts public education in a really tough spot these days. Really tough.

Take the subject of school dress codes. Some schools have them. These schools operate under the idea that the clothes a student wears make some sort of statement. Parents, however, do not agree on this matter. Dress codes often end up as attempts to enforce a consensus that doesn’t exist.

Administrators fear that without dress codes and police, the order and the structure of education will be lost. In a sense, it’s a valid fear. The conditions of the instructional environment affect the outcome of the educational process. Instructors who toil under negative working conditions (and there are many who do) find it difficult to perform as well.

The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work that well to impose a set of standards on a public that does not agree on those standards. Which brings us to the final, and perhaps most practical thing to do to improve public education: get the public’s opinion. Systematically, via surveys and polls and focus groups and all the things that market research companies do – instead of knee jerk responses to people who yell at school board meetings.

It may seem ridiculously difficult for public education to be responsive to the actual public. But it could also be the one thing that improves it the most.