Reaction to President Obama's proposal to create a corps of Master Teachers for the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields, and to pay those teachers a stipend of as much as $20,000 per year, has been generally enthusiastic (except, of course, among those who question where the funding will come from, and those whose attitude toward the current administration is uniformly of the "Can any good come out of Nazareth?" form.) As a teacher myself, I'm generally in favor of efforts to put more money into education. But, as a teacher of English Language Arts and History, and a newly-certificated Teacher-Librarian, I have to say, I'm feeling more than a little disrespected by the narrow focus of the proposed program. And as a student of both the general history and the educational history of this country, I wonder how badly that narrow focus may rebound against the very people it is supposed to benefit - the current and future students of our educational system.
Let me tell you a story about the impact of an earlier educational shift on one person. In October of 1957, the then-Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1, the first artificial Earth satellite. Reaction in the United States was swift - we were losing the space race and something must be done! One of the first things to be done on many university and college campuses was to mandate higher standards in the schools of engineering. While this certainly seems like a reasonable reaction, the net effect was a skewing of the grading scale at some schools to the point that, what would have earned a B or better in any other field garnered no better than a C for an engineering student. Many such students later found themselves foreclosed from the graduate school programs of their choice because students from other schools could demonstrate higher GPAs, even though they had been held to a far lower standard. For the person I speak of, despite excellent scores on the LSAT, he had to settle for admission to a lower-tier law school - and this, in turn, meant he was not considered for the kind of clerkships and internships that might have led to the offer of a partnership track position with one of the more high-powered law firms in his area of specialization. It is no exaggeration to say that the shift in engineering school standards had life-long consequences for this person, and, I am sure, for most of a generation.
I personally was a victim of New Math - elementary education's equivalent to the engineering school debacle caused by Sputnik, and brought on by the same over-reaction to the Red Menace. I was in fourth grade when New Math was introduced, and all of my difficulties in the subject were attributed to either ineffective teaching or a failure on my part to make the adjustment from the "old math" habits I had acquired during my first few years of school. As a result, my learning disability - dyscalcula - went undiagnosed until I was very nearly 50, and I suffered through years of feeling inadequate because I couldn't get Algebra.
But there are bigger issues here than simply the potential damage of too intense a focus on some subjects. For one, there's the damage that arises out of undervaluing the more abstract, less quantifiable subject areas. And there's the very real threat that this concentration on STEM will widen the educational gap between the classes and the races.
STEM subjects are not going to be accessible to students who are reading below grade-level - it doesn't matter how qualified a teacher is or how much that teacher is being paid, if the students can't comprehend the material in the textbook. Each of the various remedial reading programs I have seen have been successful for some portion of the students exposed to them, but no one size fits all program has yet emerged. The only uniformly effective approach is increased exposure through elective reading. Where is the funding for school libraries and - more important - the qualified school librarians who can help students find material they want to read? And even for those students who can readily profit from STEM, do we really want a generation of technocrats whose social skills are modeled on Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory) or Temperance Brennan? (Bones) If we fund and support STEM at the expense of language and the rest of the humanities, this may be what we are faced with.
We classify subjects as part of the Humanities because they touch on what it is that makes us human. By all means, provide more funding for the teaching profession - but apply it across the fields. Don't create another case of educational tunnel vision. Learn from the mistakes of the past. Remember the words of Santayana (and if you can remember those words, thank a history teacher and/or a librarian.)
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