Forbes – Chad Orzel
“In the short bio that serves as a tagline here, I promise to write not only about physics, but science and academia as well. Fareed Zakaria has conveniently provided me with a hook to do just that, with a much-shared Washington Post piece headlined “Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous.” (“STEM” of course is the trendy acronym for “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.”) Zakaria’s piece is promoting his new book In Defense of a Liberal Education, and working where I do, I see a lot of these. Zakaria’s particular “defense” isn’t especially good or bad, as such things go, just a little more well-connected than most. As is very common with such things, he engages in a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu, giving examples of politicians disparaging the idea of majoring in arts or anthropology then decrying “this dismissal of broad-based learning,” as if suggesting students major in “practical” subjects was equivalent to saying they should never take even a single class in “impractical” subjects. In fact, what’s being questioned by calls for more and better STEM education is not the idea of broad-based education, but a different kind of narrowness, in which most students who go on to work in business and public policy do everything they can to avoid science classes.”(more)