Push to engineer future using STEM
THE Federal Minister for Education has yet another action plan to improve the maths and science results in high schools.
In a speech delivered to the National Conference of Australian Science Teachers Association, Simon Birmingham proposes all students should have access to teachers with university studies in maths and science.
The senator’s most recent thought bubble is practising engineers will give up a respected career to become STEM teachers!
Last year, the NSW Education Minister told a private girls’ school STEM had become a buzzword and fad and its promotion over the humanities and other disciplines was “intellectual snobbery”.
The enrolment in particular faculties is not a social construct. A brain- scan study of science undergraduates revealed more grey matter in the medial prefrontal cortex, also associated with autism and lack of empathy, while humanities students displayed more white matter around the white hippocampus, detrimental to spatial reasoning.
The controversy over whether one discipline should be promoted over the other, or whether the two should be combined rather than competitive continues to rage in America.
In Queensland half a century ago, first- year medical students at St Lucia were compelled to take a humanities subject. There was also a trend for engineering students to defect to philosophy.
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker believes 18th century enlightenment was the age of the philosopher/ scientist. The 19th century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen never ceased to be prophetic: “What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them.”
Steve Jobs believed Apple’s DNA consisted of the marriage of technology and the humanities.
In today’s pluralistic society, however, the problem is whether there should be a program of empathy and ethics for autonomous robots or autonomous banks.