Edu-Fads 4
Thoreau tries to understand the reason for the fascination with STEM (I think that means science, technology, engineering, and math). He poses several possibilities. Here’s just one:
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September 8, 2014 at 12:16 pm
STEM has been both jargon and a fad for a number of years. When you hear an educator or a politician or, well, anyone, use the acronym, you immediately know two things: (1) they don’t know anything about science or the state of it in this country; and/or (2) they have a career in promoting it.
It has worked under the broadly based and -wrong- assumption that the US does not produce -enough- people with advanced training in science and math. This is a widely held myth and it’s bull. We produce a lot of Ph.Ds in science and math and advanced degrees in computer science and have for years. It produced glut and there was a reason behind that. It was to get the doctorates to work at really low wages as support workers — postdocs that go on for over a decade, which is advanced research dr. for almost free, non-tenured adjunct teaching in the academy so the tenured scientists didn’t have to do any of it and could be focused on bringing in research grants. There are other reasons but these are two. I’m telling you this from firsthand experience.
It’s not really about making things. Ph.Ds in the sciences, well, they’re not about making stuff. Basic science research isn’t applications, its blue sky research on why stuff works the way it does at a very low level, what makes the universe, or various aspects of matter, energy, the pathways of life, work.
Bachelors and masters degrees are basically meaningless in relationship to that except as lab
technician help. The Ph.D. is the only union card. Worse, in our current climate, lab technicians, that is undergrad degrees, in the hard sciences don’t earn great money. Which is part of the idea, too. The national policy is to train people for white lab coat technician jobs that, by design, don’t pay much but which sound good to those who are just getting into it or those who know nothing about the professional environment.
http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/?p=17312
September 8, 2014 at 12:57 pm
AFAIC, STEM is a cover for turning institutions of education into trade schools; “what we need,” it claims, “is more Lincoln Techs.” It was forged in the same fever pits as charter schools.
It’s not making students smarter, but it sure is making administrators dumber.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-27/los-angeles-school-district-suspends-its-ipad-program
September 9, 2014 at 2:08 am
Community colleges etc. Mills for low-pay lab techs. Has nothing to do with real science and math, neither of which can be fudged at the level where it matters.
September 9, 2014 at 11:28 pm
I got nothing against community colleges.
“Private” for-profit student loan mills are a whole nother story.
I don’t know what’s worse on my telly vision–the ads for Big Pharma or the ads for student loan mills.