Keep Curiosity in Our Classrooms

KEEP

curiosity IN OUR CLASSROOMS

Maya Kreger

We are no longer a nation of dreamers. Rather, our students learn that only money equals success and therefore happiness. American K-12 education prioritizes some subjects at the expense of others with the idea that only a few areas lead to prosperity. The biggest leaders in our country encourage our students to “stop dreaming and start thinking practically” in a last-ditch effort to keep America competitive (Zakaria 179). While other nations are becoming more competitive in their education systems, America is lagging behind. The diverse studies included within the liberal arts have been supplanted by the encroachment of STEM centered learning in order to prepare the nation’s youth for our technology based economy. STEM will never be enough to solve our educational woes and for this reason should be deemphasized. Instead, a return to the liberal arts will ensure America’s future as the leader of innovation and productivity. STEM education has been a hallmark of the American high school curriculum since the beginning of this century. It places emphasis on its integral parts (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) while pushing students to be innovative. This so-called innovation that STEM education engenders instead translates into vocation in the minds of students. Students studying business or engineering likely choose these broad subjects because, in our digital age, their success in the job market is nearly guaranteed. Who needs an anthropologist when you can have a software engineer? In reality, we need both. Yes, a software engineer can create an app, but an anthropologist can tell us the very human problems that may have required the app in the first place. Most real world problems discussed in school cannot be solved through simply programming a solution. Human problems need human answers. Students should be encouraged to participate in liberal arts educations to be able to apply diverse thinking to all the issues that plague our country. In many cases, STEM does not even live up to its name and only provides a sub-par introduction to vital topics like programming. Intended to maintain the US’s top position on the world stage, STEM instead breeds a generation of engineers who can’t tell the difference between denotation and connotation(Zakaria 181). What our country needs is not scientists who don’t read, but well-rounded students prepared to face all the challenges proposed within our technological society. In theory, STEM fosters a mindset of growth and innovation but in reality, in many K-12 programs, it lacks the diverse range of subjects that its name implies. As Virginia Heffernan writes in her WIRED magazine piece about the “pedagogical vapor of STEM,” this combination of four disciplines “might reasonably be expected to cover: fluid mechanics, C++, the periodic table, PEMDAS...” and an entire paragraph more of equally important topics. For this reason, STEM, in many ways, is an illusion and should be deemphasized. It presents an infinite amount of broad topics, but in truth K-12 students are only taught basic computer programming and how to build earthquake-proof towers of popsicle sticks. STEM is the window dressing of the American education system; it pretends to address our nation’s problems while just creating ‘thinkers’ who have lost their human touch. A more thorough education that would benefit America would be one of liberal arts, supplemented with technology and the traditional ‘hard’ sciences. In line with the American dream, students should be able to explore “a richer, deeper set of courses in subjects they found fascinating” (Zakaria 180). America’s education system needs to stop emphasizing certain subjects, but instead foster learning of all areas. The very notion that some aspects of the

humanities are ‘soft’ sciences encourages bright students to pick subjects of disinterest to them. This emphasis on STEM early on in education discourages the natural curiosity of students, leading them to pick what seems ‘hard’ and discard what is ‘soft’ as irrelevant. When we build walls around subjects, we rid “our sense of reality as a coherent whole, which it actually is” (McCulley). Famed Transcendentalist thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil,” meaning that students should have the opportunity to discover what their academic passion is, not be forced into an interest (208). Emerson also states that the moment school “is organized, difficulties begin” meaning that nature is the best teacher (Emerson 210). While school obviously must be organized to some degree, we need to rid our system of categorizing broad and substantive topics into one name and begin anew with an interdisciplinary approach. Like nature, all aspects of knowledge involve each other and this needs to be reflected in the classroom. The deficiency of American education may not merely come from the stress placed on the sciences and technology. Rather, it can be found in the weakness of the humanities. Before educators knock STEM teaching down to the level of humanities, they should attempt to bolster classes like literature and history to level these subjects’ importance with the sciences. To truly embrace an interdisciplinary approach to K-12 education, the humanities, along with other historically ‘soft’ subjects, must be enhanced. To remain as a leader in the global workforce and in education, America needs to allow students to see each subject as equally important and interconnected. This will produce creative thinkers who are better equipped to apply diverse knowledge to real world problems. In a world where early specialization is seen as a quick fix to stay competitive, America will be able to reopen problems previously seen as closed. Modern students rarely read for fun, which is understandable “given the dreariness with which literature is taught in many American classrooms” (Prose 224). Francine Prose, a reporter and writer, “collected eighty or so reading lists from high schools throughout the country” with shocking results: they were all strikingly similar and relatively mediocre (Prose 226). In lieu of discussing A Separate Peace in virtually every school, humanities teachers should pick unique books, ones that will broaden the perspective of their students. If high schoolers believe that the scope of literature starts with Shakespeare and ends with Steinbeck, they will truly never know the variety present within the humanities. How can a service-based economy, being primarily digital, function without STEM? It cannot. Obviously, our country should not rid itself of the subjects within STEM; that would not be beneficial. However, we do need to stop pretending it is the panacea for poor educational systems and an America moving away from its peak. The liberal arts are essential to all industries, including business and technology. If students in the US’s K-12 system had the ability to explore all academic subjects and later pick their primary interests regardless of the economic feasibility of jobs, true innovation would be incited. Set aside specialization for college and keep curiosity in our classrooms. Only when students are encouraged to think differently can America remain competitive.

WORKS CITED

Works Cited: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Education. The Language of Composition:

Reading, Writing, Rhetoric . Shea, et al., Boston, Mass., 2018, Bedford, Freeman & Worth, pp. 208-210. Heffernan, Virginia.“How We Learned to Love the Pedagogical Vapor of STEM”. WIRED, Conde Nast, https://www.wired. com/story/how-we-learned-to-love-pedagogical-vaporstem/,17 December 2019. McCulley, George. “Academic Disciplines: Synthesis or Demise?”. New England Board of Higher Education, https://nebhe.org/ journal/academic-disciplines-synthesis-or-demise/, 3 April 2018. Prose, Francine. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read”. The

Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric . Shea, et al., Boston, Mass., 2018, Bedford, Freeman & Worth, pp.224-235. Zakaria, Fareed. “In Defense of a Liberal Education”. The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric . Shea, et al., Bos ton, Mass., 2018, Bedford, Freeman & Worth, pp. 179-188.