By Stephanie Allen, Project Assistant.
We spend a lot of time focusing on STEM education in economic
development. We worry that as a nation, a state, a county, a community
we’re falling behind our peers in STEM education so we create STEM
focused programs for K-12 students. We lament the fact that fewer and
fewer students are obtaining college degrees in STEM areas so we
encourage our young adults to major in STEM areas and we tell them about
all the job opportunities there will be for them with an engineering,
mathematics, applied science, etc. degree.
You really don’t see economic developers suggesting the workforce might
be better off with more training in philosophy, or history, or poetry,
or dead languages. It’s not just economic developers that are focused on
STEM areas either. It’s college chancellors, and the president,
not to mention scores of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles—if I
had a nickel for every time someone asked what I was going to do with a
philosophy degree…
Last month Daniel Jelski, a professor of chemistry and former dean of
the School of Science and Engineering at SUNY New Platz, penned an
article for the New Geographer
that suggests maybe those humanities degrees aren’t so useless after
all. In fact, the humanities may be better at helping students to
develop and hone the skills Jelski sees as necessary for future
employment.
Jelski lays out three laws for future employment: #1 People will get
jobs doing things that computers can’t do, #2 A global market place will
result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers, #3
Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to
have a steady job. According to Jelski, there’s good reason to think
there will be fewer STEM careers in the future as more and more jobs are
computerized. That there are fewer electrical engineering majors today
than there were 25 years ago doesn’t trouble Jelski because thanks to
computers we need far fewer electrical engineers than we did 25 years
ago. The same is true of chemists and mathematicians. Even computer
scientists and programmers are not immune; many of the jobs done by
programmers 25 years ago are now done by computers. While education in
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics will always be
important, Jelski suggests that education in the humanities might be
equally good, if not better, for preparing people for jobs in the
future.
In the future, Jelski predicts that as more and more people become
freelancers, it isn’t credentials or simple job training that
job-seekers will need, but rather self-generated expertise and abilities
that can’t be replicated by computers (like empathy and
compassion)—things which cannot be taught, but may be better nurtured
with at least some education in the humanities, where students are more
often encouraged to cultivate their general curiosity about the world,
develop their own programs of study, and do more than just follow the
directions to earn their credential.
Ultimately though Jelski thinks it isn’t what we study that will matter
because it isn’t an education that we’ll need but rather a set of softer
skills—skills that cannot be directly taught, but are nonetheless often
developed in school. What Jelski doesn’t mention is that it is the
development of these same skills that liberal arts college presidents
and Montessori, Waldorf, and other alternative pedagogy school
proponents have long touted as the most important parts of their
educational strategies.
If Jelski’s right, it may mean that we should stop trying to play catch
up when it comes to test scores in STEM areas and stop making the focus
of education the ability to memorize formulas and follow directions. It
may mean we should start instead to try and get ahead of the game by
following the lead of Montessori, Waldorf, and liberal arts schools and
turn our focus toward teaching our children how to learn, how to love
learning, how to think for themselves, and how to care about and respect
each other.
