It’s time we examine seriously, the inexorable rise of S.T.E.M., particularly in relation to the disappearance of the arts in education.

What is S.T.E.M.?

S.T.E.M. stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (or Math).

Why wouldn’t you want to promote those subjects? In fact I’d chuck in English to make S.T.E.E.M.,  as English teaches syntactic skills so necessary for programming.

S.T.E.M. is symptomatic of the weird, steam-punk Victorian-style of modern education – melding old-fashioned curricula and end of year exams with modern data-driven performance results, that are unable to quantify the long-term, intangible benefits of the arts.

Let’s face it, S.T.E.M.on it’s own is only useful for creating robots, and S.T.E.M., on it’s own, will only create robots of our future generations.

There is one big problem… we are already creating robots to replace our future generations. In ten year’s time we will have a generation brought up to do the work of robots, which is already being performed by robots.

Which humans will survive and have meaningful lives? The creative ones – the mavericks who, against all advice and without encouragement, taught themselves.

The application of S.T.E.M. relies on brilliant, creative minds. You won’t get those without S.T.E.A.M. – Science, Technology, Engineering, ART and Maths.

Art, in this case, covers all the creative subjects and activities and includes practical experimentation and failure – yes, even blowing up the chemistry lab by mistake!

Robots do repetitive tasks. Humans do creativity, it’s what they do best. They do it even better when taught the skills and are nurtured.