Almost everyone who reads probably knows the acronym STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. I love all those things, and I’m useful at some of them. The A in STEAM is from the Arts and Humanities, so maybe it should be SHTEAM? But STEAM is what has stuck, and so be it.
I’m such a big fan of the scientific method that recent high-profile abuses of it for political purposes moved me to coin David’s First Law of Politics: anything plus politics equals politics. For example, when you mix science and politics, you get politics, not science.
My title at the office is Chief Marketing Technology Officer, so I spend some time with technology.
I’m not a trained engineer, but I have a farm boy’s (or coder’s) love of figuring out how to make things work–and work a little better, a little better, even better . . .
I’ve forgotten most of the math I used to know, which was a lot. I did graduate-level math at Utah State University one summer, while I was in high school. What I remember, I use fairly regularly, and vice versa, and I enjoy it. Sometimes I do math for fun. Number theory, for example. Or ask me sometime about Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries, which matter more than you probably realize.
So yes, I strongly favor large doses of STEM in education. But here’s the thing. Ultimately, STEM without the A (and H) produces high-tech barbarians. Even if you don’t value humans in general that much, and don’t value the empathy and expressions which STEM cannot touch, even the most committed partisan of STEAM should appreciate what is now widely proven: students learn STEM better when they also experience literature, music, theater, philosophy, languages, art.
Let’s consider fiction–literature, if you will–as an example, since that’s what I write. In fact, let’s zoom in to the novel, fiction’s largest form. In a long essay (short book) entitled The Novel, Who Needs It?, the estimable Joseph Epstein says things like this in his short first chapter:
“Fiction–solid, serious, penetrating fiction–cuts deeper than such standard versions of truth-telling as those on offer in history, biography, social science, philosophy, and elsewhere” (p. 3).
(But fiction is not true, says STEM. Oh, but it is, says STEAM. It is “the truth of the imagination,” “the truth of the human heart” [p. 4].)
“Reading the superior novels . . . arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does. . . . The genre . . . provides truths of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else” (p. 5).
Life, he will go on to explain, including the inner life of humans, is more complex than we can see or express without the novel. In my experience, we need is just as great for music, the visual arts, poetry, dance, and the rest of the arts and humanities.
Simply put, the A in STEAM makes us more human. It makes us better humans. I assert that to be more human, to be better humans, is a good thing. Without it, well, remember those high-tech barbarians I mentioned? We’re getting there.
In education, in entertainment, in life we need STEAM, not STEM.