There Will Be More Innovations until Morale Improves

S.T.R.E.A.M. versus school: A short case study on the plague of innovations.

I’m no educator, and I’ve tried my best to avoid school my whole life. But I have two kids in it now, and I see new phrases for what was school - S.T.E.M., S.T.E.A.M. and S.T.R.E.A.M. And I asked isn’t school enough? Why do we need these new things?

S.T.E.M.

It started with S.T.E.M.: S - Science; T - Technology; E - Engineering; M - Math. And it sort of made sense. The test scores were bad. And all the economic growth was coming from healthcare and technology. So sure, more of that stuff for the kiddos. Gotta compete!

S.T.E.A.M.

Then it became S.T.E.A.M., adding A - Art. Not sure why. Maybe they thought, well, give the kids a break! This was dumb as hell, because a real break would be a break, not more school. Maybe some administrator read a listicle that said art combats depression, and it would save the next generation a few bucks on generic Zoloft. Maybe it’s a way to get the kids from checking out entirely.

Or maybe - and call me cynical - the kids need a little cultivating if they’re going to overspend what they earn in their math-based careers on stylized consumer and luxury goods. So they shoehorn in some arts to give the kiddos the aesthetic confidence and quote-unquote taste to really be taken for a ride on some $600 throw pillows.

S.T.R.E.A.M.

Then it became S.T.R.E.A.M., adding R - Reading. This seems to have been because oh crap the kiddos really can’t read. Turns out, the reading scores were bad, too. And the functional literacy on a day-to-day basis was both painful to observe and hard to ignore. So, sure, why not throw it in?

Let’s react

Just to sum up, this is a reorientation of education. S.T.R.E.A.M. adds technology and engineering to the classes I took in 20th-Century school. I guess we had “computer lab” maybe 20 times per year. But kids have the equivalent of computer lab every waking non-school hour now it seems.

My first impression of S.T.R.E.A.M. is that it’s entirely dedicated to the commercial person - the worker and consumer, ignoring the rest. Don’t worry. I’m not going to go all mushy on the humanities. I’ll try to keep it practical.

Where we’re actually failing

The problem with S.T.R.E.A.M. is that it neglects the areas where people seem to be uniquely terrible lately.

Philosophy and literature aren’t as useless as they’re portrayed. People who don’t have a solid grasp of logic and language are easier to manipulate. This is flagrant in the state of the political conversation. But maybe more than politics, the absence of critical thinking is where commerce takes the ball and runs. Work is more demanding and pays less. The money it pays buys less. But the economy is great, or at least strong. Just look at the GDP.

Numbers are authority in our world. Language and critical thinking is what allows people to interpret the numbers, with which we are inundated. But what happens when the numbers touted by those in power don’t match the lives people are living? If they lack the tools to inquire effectively what happened, things get ugly. At best, it contributes to a pervasive sense of being ripped off, which excuses the ripping off of others, or at least looking the other way. At worst, it leads to utterly uncritical fantasies about who’s really running the ripoff, which require equally fantastic solutions.

Because S.T.R.E.A.M. students don’t have history, they don’t understand what’s unique about the current situation. That includes what’s incredibly advantageous and strangely decent about the world they’re in. This is as dangerous as failing to appreciate what’s horrible about the present, and maybe moreso.

Because S.T.R.E.A.M. students don’t have what used to be called civics, they have no sense of what might be at stake in a given debate. Civics had already been swallowed up by Social Studies in my day. But its absence seems more glaring with each passing year. Seriously. Let’s just start by talking about how a bill becomes a law. Let’s unpack the checks and balances in the tripartite system of government. And no, not every election can be the most important in our lifetime.

The plague of innovations

I try not to attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by negligence, as someone in equally urgent times once advised. I think the whole S.T.E.M. thing probably started as a goodwill attempt to address an educational shortfall. But it was taken over by the clever, agreeable and opportunistic types whose handiwork we all seem to labor within these days.

The thing is that no one gets ahead by making schools better, or supporting teachers. They get ahead by inventing something that’s like the old thing, but with bigger promises and a new way of scoring its success, while siphoning off money from something that sort of worked, and lowering the pay for the people who do the actual work. Sound familiar?

It’s 2023. It’s easy to innovate. It’s an easy thing to do and an easy thing to sell. I once worked at a place where the word was so obsessively used that it became a painful obstacle to writing about what the company did. And what the company did was nothing new. Innovation, the word, became a troll barring passage on every bridge to honest and clear communication. And it’s become a troll keeping us from more than that.

The problem with innovation that it steals energy from doing simple things well. The simple things, in this single example, were called school.

Worthwhile things, and the switcheroo

Teaching school is. hard, and no one is getting rich or famous doing it, though most teachers can still earn a living. People have all kinds of reasons for wanting it another way.

They always say they can fix it. They say it’s a simple fix. But they’re never the ones who will actually do the fixing. They’re higher up, at the executive level, or the board level. I’m skeptical.

This sleight-of-hand is apparent everywhere. It flat-out wrecked music and journalism, as careers, as industries, as sources of cultural value. Technology was part of it, though I suspect a deeper urge at play.