A STEM is not a Flower

                It’s hard to go anywhere in academia these days without running across a concern for STEM education.  It makes it seem like science, technology, engineering and math are the only things that even count anymore in defining the outcomes of education.   Universities are whittling away at their undergraduate general education requirements and shrinking the departments in what we used to self-confidently call the ‘liberal arts.’  The University of Wisconsin at Stephens Point went so far as to propose eliminating them.  I think there are two reasons, at least, to pump the brakes on this rush to trim education to training in STEM disciplines.

                The first is simply pragmatic.  Although advisors and administrators are quick to smugly point out the employment potential of these programs, they overlook a very important variable.  The things that students are trained to do in STEM programs are precisely the jobs that will be lost in the economy when a mature version of AI is introduced.  My sense is that the merger of AI into technical fields is much closer than most people think.  When it gets here, it isn’t going to be a slow process of change.  The industrial revolution took centuries to mature, and the computer revolution took only decades.  AI will happen in years and months.  It is foolish and irresponsible to train people to do something that a computer can do better and faster.  It is only a matter of time before a computer will do it better and faster.

                Schools sell these programs because they are little more than corporations themselves.  The people who run them and who advise students have pretty much given up any pretense of being ‘educators.’  They are in business to shill for the latest fad in hiring, regardless of how that fad serves the long -range interests of their customers – I mean students.  Of course, people need to know more about the disciplines covered in STEM programs.  The lack of science literacy has been devastating to our environment and our democracy, but selling these programs as a career path is short sighted.

                The second reason goes to the heart of what it means to be educated.  Being educated is more than getting the right answer on a test or solving a structured problem someone else created. It’s nice, but it’s not an adequate proof of being educated.  The problems we all have to solve right now are unstructured and chaotic.  They don’t appear in text books, and they can’t be solved by technical expertise alone.   At the bottom of every important question or problem we face is a question of value and ethics.  In many cases the important question is not what can we do but what should we do.  Giving someone a job is nice, but it’s not the same thing as giving them a vision of the world.  A job doesn’t make them a better citizen, neighbor or partner.  A job isn’t the same thing as a conscience. 

                STEM education without a context of value and meaning is not only inadequate, it’s dangerous.  As the technology we develop becomes more powerful it also becomes more of a threat.  We can do more damage more quickly than ever before.  We have to have a space to think and discuss what the next phase of the world will become.  We are wired into instant torrents of information but have lost the ability to use what some people call ‘slow’ thinking, the ability to step back and evaluate the scope and rationale of our actions.  STEM education, as it’s currently constituted, isn’t designed to do those things.

                In case you missed it, we’re in a big mess right now.  Everything from democracy to sex to masculinity is up for grabs.  The old system of values and norms is fading fast – and that’s a good thing.  What happens next, however, is not going to be so easy to navigate.  If we’re not going to devolve into warring clans fighting over the last glass of water, we need vision – we need imagination.  We need an education that helps people cope with more than the operating system on their new phone.  If we mess this up, we can’t just ‘die,’ reboot it and start over.  We have information – we lack wisdom.  Before we shove the last Religion and Philosophy professor out the door and fill their office with more machines, we ought to stop for a second and ask ourselves what we want to become.

Broken Bits

                Just as capitalism has reduced everything in the world to a single type of value, computers have reduced all information to binary bits.  Everything a computer transmits has to be stripped of any contextual value it had because of where, how and by whom it was created so it can be shuffled through the internet and delivered without context to your screen.  As a result, we have access to an almost unlimited amount of information, but none of it has any meaning attached to it.  This presents us with a problem people have never faced before: how to construct a world without context.  In the past information was sorted by the tribe, by the school, by the government or church.  Those institutions still exist, and some people still use them to construct meaning, but the more common experience is to be set adrift to drown in random and unconnected bits of information.

                On one hand, this situation is liberating.  People don’t have to rely on the school, the government, or the church to get their information about the world.  I don’t agree with folks who argue we should go back to an institutional check on knowledge.  I think the leveling of knowledge is an important part of liberation.  Going back to the old set up is to go back to the old forms of oppression.  On the other hand, the overabundance of decontextualized information presents us with a challenge people have never faced before, and we are ill equipped to deal with it.  Many people run back to their tribe and use it block out anything that challenges that orthodoxy.  The irony of having so much information is that it is so overwhelming that the easy way out is to block it out and only let in information that confirms what our tribe already believes. 

                We see the impact of this move in our politics and the culture wars that divide us.  It shows up in climate change denial and arguments about abortion and drugs and almost anything else you can imagine.  Anybody can find somebody who supports their beliefs.  Blaming this situation on cultural relativism or postmodernism misses the point.  We were always already ‘relativistic’ in our views, we just used the centralized institutions of modernity to silence the dissonance.  That’s not possible anymore.  That is both a good thing and a perplexing problem.  How do we build a decentralized and democratic space where we can engage with each other in a civil and affirming manner? 

                More than a few Sci Fi novels and movies have taken this problem and resolved it by imagining a future dystopia where there is only one book and one mystery to solve.  This going back to the beginning and starting over path is beyond brutal and unacceptable.  It is futile to keep running out the same institutional elites we’ve used in the past to solve this problem.  We are at a critical point where we are either going to make a collective jump in consciousness or we’re going to perish.  People have made these leaps before – at the end of the Middle Ages – in the speculative philosophy of Greece – and in other times and places where the old way of thinking broke down.  Our situation is all the more intense because if we fail it won’t just be the end of one civilization, it will be the end of civilization, period.

                We are going to have to revise our understanding of learning, education and community.  We don’t need centralized institutions.  We need to shift our focus away from a single solution to multiple and iterative solutions, solutions that work one person and one community at a time.  The only way to create this new consciousness is to work with each person to help them reach the highest frame of consciousness they can attain.  The goal is to work past anger and purification to create small and shifting alliances that can strengthen over time.  We have to revisit the idea of what it means to be human and how we fit in the larger life system we’re a part of.  If you’re thinking that sounds way too idealistic and spacey, consider the alternative.  We have played ourselves into a position that is as dire and desperate as any we have ever been in.  Nothing we’ve already done will work again.  This work will be done face to face, day to day.  We’ll find out if we’re up to the task.  We’ll find out if we have a future.