AgLiving06 said:
I'm curious what's y'alls thoughts are on STEM/STEAM educations vs a Classical education?
My opinion on this has evolved a couple times and TBH is still evolving.
Every sentence in here should have a qualifier that this is only my opinion. For readability I've left those out. I've also shortened things that deserve a more nuanced treatment. And I'm using STEM, I've not been able to figure out the value of the category "STEAM". I'll use "LA" as a catch-all for "not-STEAM", recognizing that it is not exactly accurate, and CE for Classical Education.
TL;DR: We need to make sure college helps the typical student. The CE paradigm, especially in its guise as a core curriculum, does not serve the typical college student in 2020.
We've forgotten that the traditional CE was intended for people who are already wealthy or connected. The expectation that everyone ought to incur >$100,000 in costs* to obtain an education that suits them for a life of erudite 18th century salon conversations is a little bit odd. The core curriculum idea in college should be jettisoned because college has a different mission than it used to.
The mission has become to prepare students for careers. Plenty of people deny that, but it's true. Classes in a student's major (STEM or LA) are difficult, time consuming, and thorough. Electives and core classes are either trivial or repeats of things already done in high school. Thus, the college is acting as though it is a job preparation program. Students almost all intend to use their degree to go into a career in that field. When they leave college with debt and either can't get a job or don't make enough in the field to pay their debt, they are irate. They couch their anger in terms of return on investment. Thus, the students also act as though it is a job preparation program.
Attempting to dismiss that vision of college by calling it vocational school doesn't bother me. That's what it is in 2020. That's how our society is organized, and the institutions and students follow, whether they openly admit it or not.
To the extent that we want to make sure everyone has a certain base of skills and knowledge, we need to do that somewhere everyone goes. That's high school, because not everyone goes to college.
College should primarily be organized into degrees intended to suit graduates for careers. That should include preparation for careers in LA (in the context of a reformed educational finance system; one option is noted in the asterisk below). What we talk about colleges doing with core curricula is not what happens. LA students aren't learning STEM from their STEM classes. STEM students aren't learning critical thinking or getting a classical education from their LA classes.
If students want to broaden their education from their major, they should get a minor and those minors should be real, tough classes where you learn a lot about the subject. Or they can self-educate, which is quite possible especially now with the internet. That's the path I'm following.
I hold a STEM degree and now spend an enormous amount of time educating myself on philosophy, literature, history, economics, and the arts. But that wasn't the career I wanted. The LA classes I took had little educational value, but they took money and an extra semester of class hours. That is time and money that I didn't have. I may go back and get another degree, even start a second career, but I'll do it when I can afford it.
I absolutely believe in the value of a classical education, but I do not believe that society is best served by attempting to force 30% or more of the population to have one. A portion of the pathologies of the current educational system are rooted in our attempts to do it in spite what people and society really want. In a different world, that wouldn't be true.
For example, I would be perfectly happy hiring a new graduate with a CE to be an accountant or an analyst. They have to be trained anyway, and if they did a good job on a rigorous classical program they are capable of learning the basics of the job as quickly as a business major. If enough managers in enough professions felt that way, and enough students had enough interest to stick it out, then putting 80% of college students through some variant of a CE** would be a valid solution***. But they don't, so it isn't.
*Whether they pay the costs or someone else does. How to finance college is a separate discussion, but here's one option: If you're old enough to vote and live on your own, you're old enough to know whether or not you should sign for a loan. Keeping the student responsible for paying, making loans dischargable in bankruptcy, and removing government backing will align the economic incentive of the financing with the way society treats education and result in students doing a better job of selecting career paths and institutions doing a better job of preparing students.
**One option would be ground up classical education, another would be trimming "major classes" back to the equivalent of a minor and expanding the core curricula to be a much more challenging and robust course of study.
***Some careers are so technical that they probably require years of specific training, and so there may always be a place for some "vocational" degrees regardless of the general thoughts on CE. I don't know that I like the idea of IT and engineering professions needing to complete an MS before they can get a real job.
