By OOI KEE BENG
IT IS NOW fashionable in education marketing to add “A’ to “STEM”, as a means to extend and deepen the range of topics a school covers. While teaching Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to the young has been commendable in many ways, albeit mainly in providing talent to corporations, the need to supply “Art” education has grown stronger.
But what does “Art” denote here? What is it that’s missing from STEM that STEAM seeks to remedy?
Apparently, as in so many cases where reality is reduced to an acronym, the phenomenon began in the United States. In 2012, the House of Representatives decided that Art and Design should be inserted into the STEM fields to encourage innovation and economic growth.
The older ones among us are left wondering if this is just a way of mending the rift between what we once knew as the Sciences and the Arts? I suppose, to some extent, that has to be the case. But STEM appears to be more than just the Sciences. It is an attempt—commendable now doubt—to connect theory to practice, and practice to employment.
As stated on the UCF (University of Central Florida) website, “STEM-focused curricula aim to equip professionals with the skills and knowledge necessary to compete in a global economy across the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math, as well as subspecialties such as statistics, biology, psychology, economics, agriculture and aeronautics”. The weaknesses inherent in the dichotomy, expressed on the job market as a lack of innovativeness in STEM graduates, seems over time to have made it necessary to slip a curatorial ‘A’ into the acronym, to create STEAM curricula, which “incorporate the study of the humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design, new media and more”.
“Art” here is obviously more than just art and design. It is the traditionally understood “Humanities”. But given the STEM context in which it appears, skills from the Humanities are but assists—to use a football goal-scoring term—to STEM’s hard-science ambitions. A mere handmaiden to STEM, and therefore diminished as a field of knowledge in its development of young minds.
This article uses this contemporary pedagogical innovation to revisit the divisions between the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Through that recapitulation, one can perhaps approach more confidently some of the new challenges raised by the coming of Artificial Intelligence on one hand, and disperse some of the confusion found in modern political experiences on the other.
Revisiting the History of Scientific Thinking
Scientific thought has generally been plagued by apparent essential differences in the subjects of study into which it ventures. The so-called “Father of Empiricism”, the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626), for example, in calling for the radical method of “induction” to be adopted in generating knowledge, and for the acceptance of that process is necessarily slow and cumulative but never conclusive, found it necessarily to distinguish three types of knowledge.
More than being a discoverer of some scientific discovery, he helped lay the foundation for scientific thought through his steadfast claim that scientific knowledge has to come from careful observation of nature filtered through inductive reasoning. Natural phenomena being too complicated to understand merely from observation, he championed controlled experimentation as the necessarily slow path toward understanding causality in Nature.
What is worth considering for anyone interested in epistemology is Bacon’s attempt to classify varieties of learning. He separates Philosophy from History and Poesy. Technically, for him, Philosophy deals with our faculty of reason, while History concerns itself with memory, and Poesy with our ability to imagine. For us today, these distinctions can inspire us to think more deeply about the diverse nature of what we effectively consider ‘knowledge’.
However successful STEM may be in attracting students, in equipping teachers to test them, and in supplying them subsequently as talents to industry, the hard sciences involved have simply been “too hard”. Thus, the addition of ‘A’—to amend, to assist and to augment. In the Baconian context, STEM should not merely be about practical sciences but also about the coining and debating of concepts as well, i.e. Philosophy is vital to scientific understandings. Beyond that, History allows for human contextualisation, and Poesy for human aspirations. Why are we doing this? How are we able to do this? How long should we do this? Such questions about the science and technology need answers too.
If the remedial effects of adding the ‘A’ lead us back to the beginnings [and history] of modern scientific debates, then that is commendable indeed. It should however not be considered a mere tweak done to satisfy administrators and marketers of education.
Avoiding Bad Habits of Thought
To further the argument about the educational benefits to be gained from revisiting the history of scientific thought—and this has much to teach us about society and power today as it does about technological innovations and marketing skills—Bacon also ignited debates through his identifying of three “distempers” of learning. These, he called “fantastical learning”, “contentious learning” and “delicate learning”, or alternatively “vain imaginations”, vain altercations” and “vain affectations”, respectively.
The first deals with what we might call pseudo-sciences today, and which the inductive method would put right. The second denotes any intellectual endeavour that does not seek new knowledge or a deeper understanding of things, but that is done for endless debate for its own sake. The third and most seductive vice, or vanity, which Bacon recognised from his own times is the habit among the educated to put style before substance.
In our own times, then, in 2024, an age of demagoguery, populism and sensationalism, an individual commitment at recognising and dodging such “vanities” would serve anyone who wishes not to be misled in their search for new knowledge. In private life, working life or in politics.
As was often the ambition of the early architects of scientific thought, we should—as I hope STEAM is an expression of—avoid being lured into fruitless intellectual cul-de-sacs and instead channel our energies into new discoveries, about the world and about ourselves.
Dato’ Dr Ooi Kee Beng is the Executive Director of Penang Institute, and Senior Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. His recent books include The Eurasian Core and its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing 2016). Homepage: wikibeng.com.
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