Censorship’s Air-Tight Motive … STEM Education
America’s lust for censorship has split our country. The right censors the “offensive,” ideas that bloody our morality; the left censors the “archaic,” histories that corrupt our today. It’s an ideological divide, one that pits censoring brother against censoring brother.
But there’s hope for unity, hope for one-censor/one-body. And that hope comes from Scientific American, which has given both sides a north star for censorship, a fixed principle that everyone (right, left, prude, woke) can agree upon.
This unitive idea — censorship’s “Theory of Everything” — is STEM education.
Keeping In Our STEM Cattle
In an opinion piece from Scientific American, “To Keep Students in STEM fields, Let’s Weed Out the Weed-Out Math Classes,” calculus is deemed a troll-upon-the-bridge that must be slain to “keep students in STEM.” This fencing of bodies is — as it always is with STEM — about our future not our students:
With scientific understanding and innovation increasingly central to solving 21st-century problems, this loss of talent is something society can ill afford.
Typically, problems + society drive censorship. The right censors immorality because it creates a value-problem for society. The left censors yesterday because the past is a setback to social progress. However, each side rebuts the other. For the left, right-censorship quells ideas (immoral and otherwise). For the right, left-censorship purges our past (racist and otherwise).
But the STEM argument — that our students MUST be funneled into a future-certain — is a kind of censorship without repugnance. Keeping students “in” — unweeded by contradictory ideas, paths, or challenges — is difficult to devalue or attack. An army of STEM students — their divergence prevented, their keeping-in coordinated — sounds altruistic and unquestionably beneficial to our future.
Censorship To Save The Future
Each year, hundreds of thousands of college students take introductory calculus. But only a fraction ultimately complete a STEM degree.
Will our future really need “hundreds of thousands” of STEM graduates? Will solving tomorrow’s problems hinge on a singularity of professions and nothing more? The paragraph above implies that with only a “fraction” of students completing a STEM degree, we are on the cusp of global annihilation. Thus, Scientific American makes the case for keeping “hundreds of thousands” in STEM. Weeding out (i.e., alternative passions) must be minimized today in order to save our tomorrow.
This is educational censorship … isolating and conforming. Censorship keeps students within a particular viewpoint; at the same time, it excludes ideas that might weed out contrary thinkers and paths. In terms of education, Scientific American makes a “positive” case for censoring all things non-STEM, making it neither left nor right. It’s not censorship to preserve morality; nor is it censorship to banish history. It’s censorship to insure the greater good, to prevent a generational collapse.
The Gospel Of STEM
Some will laugh at this … mock this. “Absurd” they’ll call it, to link STEM and censorship. But the language of STEM has become a kind of ideology, and once that happens, competing ideas — i.e., choices — fall prey to dogma.*
STEM’s holy language is everywhere, not just Scientific American. In this op-ed from the LA Times “How can we make more students fall in love with math?,” the driver of education (apparently) is force … to insure an outcome even if against the will. But why — against their will — would we want to “make students to fall in love with math”? The answer isn’t to better these students or ignite their passions or discover their purpose. No, the reason is simply jobs:
Companies like Google, Apple and Intel offer some of California’s most cutting-edge — and highest-paying — jobs. Last year, those three companies alone brought in more than 10,000 people from other countries to take those jobs.
The purpose of education isn’t to “make” students love a subject or “keep in” students at the expense of other opportunities. Education is an effort to lead students along different paths, to provide them choices that enlighten without fixating:
“The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.” — Chris Hedges
“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.” — James Baldwin
“The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people.” — Peter McWilliams
But STEM has become dogma, and with this, alternate paths have become censored. This censorship was recently on display at the Smithsonian which:
“[shook] up Women’s History Month with a new Women’s Futures Month: a forward-looking celebration of the power of women and girls in STEM to shape a better world. … [This celebration includes] 120 life-size 3D-printed statues** … a diverse coalition of contemporary women STEM innovators and role models leading a variety of fields, from protecting wildlife, discovering galaxies, building YouTube’s platform, to trying to cure cancer.”
“To suppress or delete as objectionable” — i.e., censorship — but in an educational forum that narrows a student’s future and conceals alternative role models. At the Smithsonian, a woman’s “future” and her ability to “shape a better world” appear limited to one thing and one thing only … STEM.*** Everyone else … the poets, the artists, the teachers, the writers, the performers … they’ve all been censored from this “better world.”
STEM’S X-Out Education
I’m a STEM grad, and I believe in STEM’s importance. There’s nothing wrong with highlighting STEM opportunities or celebrating STEM grads. But STEM has become our all-or-nothing in education, and the language/motives prove this. STEM ideology is to force, to conform, to narrow … all for the sake of jobs, society, and/or money.
The promise made is that our tomorrow depends on STEM and STEM only. If this is so and the ultimate goal — the ominous need — is to insure “hundreds of thousands” of STEM graduates, why not take it a step further and truly censor? Why not isolate STEM students — to prevent any veering — from poetry, art, philosophy, from the lure of cooking or coaching or writing? Why not ban books like Mark Edmundson’s Teacher which might weed a STEM major into (God forbid) teaching?
While he doesn’t go so far as to call it “censorship,” author William Deresiewicz alludes to the ideology — stay thy path, know thy future, resist temptation — of STEM. In his book Excellent Sheep, Deresiewicz discusses the “censorship” of alternatives for the sake of tightening the educational grip:
The fact is that elite schools have strong incentives not to produce too many seekers and thinkers, too many poets, teachers, ministers, public-interest lawyers, nonprofit workers, or even professors — too much selflessness, creativity, intellectuality, or idealism. The most prestigious institutions do provide an abundance of academic, artistic and moral opportunities, if only because they have the financial means to do so. But at the same time, colleges and universities do nothing to suggest that some ways of using your education are better than others. They do nothing, in other words, to challenge the values of a society that equates dignity, and happiness with material success. Nor do they do much to help kids find their way to alternative careers.
Censorship Of Education Vs. Freedom Of Education
According to Scientific American, the “loss of [STEM] talent is something society can ill afford”; here is the motive for censoring alternatives, for keeping in! keeping in! keeping in! However, there are other disciplines that can equally “ill afford” to lose talent. Keeping in education majors would solve our teacher shortage. Preventing “weed out” would increase student musicians, putting money back into education cuts. “Making students love” ROTC would underwrite our future, insuring a stronger military.
Of course, nobody’s advocating for these disciplines, at least not in the censorship sense. Nobody (and it would be wrong to) is arguing that today’s students should be forced, corralled, or narrow-tracked into our struggling schools, our military, or our concert halls … even if our future depends on it. And the reason we don’t do this is because we favor choice (and breadth of choice) for our students; we abhor the censoring of ideas, passions, and pathways.
But STEM is different. Hidden in the STEM language is the goal of trapping our next generation for the sake of money, security, and prestige. Why wouldn’t we want to trap students in the “highest paying” jobs, in the liberation of “21st-century problems,” in the power to “shape a better world”? These sound like noble goals, but of course, nobody’s asking: Do our students want to be trapped, or do they want to be free?
* As an out, some might call this “marketing,” as in “We’re merely marketing one path (i.e., STEM) over another.” But marketing implies competition, that free thinking is currency to be earned by an educational departments or disciplines. Another problem is that “marketing” shifts choice and exploration away from students. Students (as naïve consumers) become preyed upon when educators (as expert salespeople) actively market their focus and their beliefs.
** Apparently, this is the most women statues ever assembled in one location at one time. And in reaching this record, a whole era of women’s history was excluded.
*** We desperately need more women in STEM. Historically, women have been directed away from STEM careers (i.e, “kept in” gender pathways … “made to love” the domestic life). But STEM initiatives should be creating balance, presenting an equality of choice, not herding the masses in one direction and one direction only. The balance has tipped too far the other way; STEM should be a viable option for all women but so should — if it’s within their souls to be — any other career, pursuit, or way of life. With the pendulum swung, we’re now impressing upon women that any non-STEM path is a lesser path forward.
