The latest buzzword in education is the acronym “STEAM,” which refers to science, technology,engineering, art, and math. It’s grown especially popular in New York City, where the Brooklyn STEAM Center, a half-day public technical high school offering internships and professional training, opened in the Navy Yard early this year. Where did this term come from, and why does it so excite the disrupters and futurists in the field of education?
A decade ago, public officials, nonprofit leaders, and media commentators spent their time urging students to get into STEM – the “A” had not yet shown up. President Obama poured billions into the Department of Education to expand computer science instruction nationwide. Charitable organizations like Black Girls Code, funded by tech companies, made STEM access a matter of social justice, while anxious journalists reported that America’s universities weren’t producing enough STEM graduates to fill highly coveted positions at Facebook, Google, and Apple.
This turned out to be untrue, as later journalists noted: there were more than enough qualified applicants for Silicon Valley’s jobs. But tech companies had hoped to enlarge their labor pool further in order to pay their workers less, and the rest of us obediently declared a crisis on their behalf. The so-called crisis has never fully retreated.
There is always a tension in America’s education system between the liberal arts and workforce development. And workforce development is always winning – which is to say that there are always plenty of people who, surveying the dismal state of the world, decide that the real problem is that we aren’t doing a good enough job training our children to be of service to this dismal world. This idea, in some cases, comes from a place of real concern: a conviction that, in an economic system that generates massive human suffering as an inevitability, the task of our schools must be to create young people so skilled, so useful, that they’ll never become its victims – but of course someone must be. In other words, kids, go into STEM, whether you like it or not.
Not all people liked it. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, was there no time, these romantics wondered,for poetry and song? In Obama’s second term, the Congressional STEM Education Caucus introduced in the House of Representatives a resolution designating May 2013“STEM-to-STEAM Month” to encourage “the inclusion of art and design in the STEM fields.” STEAM entered the common lexicon as a means to soften STEM’s hard edges.
In doing so, it not only extended the life of a somewhat idiotic moment in our national pedagogy; it also covertly undertook to alter the definition, in the popular imagination, of the new component term it had generously agreed to include among the academic subjects deserving of neoliberal approbation. Why does art belong in STEM? Why not, for instance, history or philosophy, which are equally useless?
The reason is that STEAM’s art is not art; it’s design. It’s not, as Oscar Wilde would put it, art for art’s sake. It is not an expression of human feeling. It is not a creative political statement. It’s the attractive packaging for a consumer product dreamed up by engineers. It’s the aesthetic quality that Steve Jobs cherished. It may involve both imagination and technical skill, but clearly, a version of the humanities that extends only as far as drawing corporate logos, filming TV commercials, and programming video games is not the humanities.
Which is not to say that the traditional humanities in the United States have necessarily had a lot of great ideas lately, either. From what I can tell, most universities’ English departments defend themselves against budget cuts by claiming that great communication skills make great CEOs (or, if they stand in opposition to the business community’s academic dictates, they do so in elitist, reactionary fashion, fetishizing the Great Books of Western Civilization as a bulwark against social change); the same sort of logic has likely infected visual art, theater, and music. To some degree, STEAM happened before the term came about.
Why, for example, has the dreamboat of every Hollywood romantic comedy since the Reagan administration been an architect – rather than, say, a painter? It reflects our values: the architect makes gleaming skyscrapers to house corporate offices, not pointless abstract blobs on canvas. He is the pinnacle of STEAM.
The most powerful aspect of STEAM, as a cutting-edge phenomenon of the digital age, is that it has glamorized vocational training even among middle-class school populations that might otherwise resist it. Instruction intended to confer job-ready skill sets carries one connotation if the job in question is plumbing; it seems to mean something else if it’s software development. And because STEAM integrates with core academic subjects that every child must study, it can begin at kindergarten.
Locally, for example, PS 676 has re-branded itself as a “maritime STEAM” school. Far be it from me to find fault in this case – PS 676 has gotten short shrift thus far in the ongoing District 15 rezoning, and if using trendy buzzwords is what it takes to convince white parents in Carroll Gardens that sending their kids to school in Red Hook wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, so be it. I have no doubt that PS 676’s STEAM programming will offer fabulous opportunities for children to take on fun, informative projects and to discover their ingenuity.
I’m in no way against science, technology, engineering, art, or math. What I’m against is the anxiety that, in many places, drives the STEAM movement. Like STEM, it regards education as a means to prepare children for “the economy of the future” – a fast-paced, demanding place, where only the strong will survive (and philosophers, presumably, will not) – and, as STEAM, bends the arts toward the same pragmatic mindset. It may be worth remembering that the greatest problems facing the 21st century are not technical but political.
In my view, the engineering courses can probably wait till college (my dad’s an engineering professor – it looks hard), and it might be healthful in the meantime to read some fiction and history, but I’m not a teacher and have no strong prescriptions for curriculum. My only layman prescription is one of attitude: yes, we all want our kids to be employable, but please relax a little – enough, at least, to believe that we can afford a moment or two for real art amid our daily mandated training in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.
