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Why STEM Needs HEART
By Charles Peek
A few days before my 15th birthday (a year away from when I could legally drive), a polished sphere just under two feet in diameter—about twice the size of a basketball—changed my life.
The sphere had a name. It was called Sputnik. It was earth’s first artificial satellite, and it was launched for its 1400 some orbits by the then Soviet Union.
The most unlikely things happen on the most unlikely of watches, and this occurred on the watch of “Everybody Likes Ike” Eisenhower, General turned President, who, two years previous, had told the world the USA would launch just such a satellite a couple of years from then.
The Soviets, however, galvanized the energies of no less than six cabinet level ministries and beat us to the punch. The “Space Race” was on. Anyone with a short-wave radio receiver could track Sputnik in its orbit. Ike claimed not to be surprised, but in Ike’s cabinet they were tracking something else—the trajectory of how to catch up! Just a little over a year later, Congress passed and Ike signed the National Defense Education Act, designed to improve education in America at almost every level.
Naturally, much of the NDEA funds went for education in the areas that would most directly contribute to catching up in space, namely science, technology, engineering, and math. But few people then would have ever thought of those branches of learning as standing alone. In my home, where there was always a pretty rigorous review of my homework, I was taught almost daily that the ability to read was at the heart of all learning. And, oh yes, you had to be able to use that reading to learn how to think. “Didn’t you just read that?” meant “You haven’t thought it through yet!”
Experienced readers and thinkers knew that reading and writing, speaking and listening, were the tools of literacy and, therefore, they were what taught a person to think clearly, learn from experience, and make increasingly wise choices. I don’t recall anyone ever using the term “the humanities” to label any of this, nor do I recall anyone ever thinking that these disciplines now called the humanities could be separated from their companions, the arts.
I was soon to learn a practical example of how people conceived of the relationship of national security and learning when in college I encountered older students preparing for the foreign service exam, an exam you had no way of passing if you did not know how to draw analogies, identify works of art, solve problems, and, in essence, bring together everything that had gone into a “college prep” curriculum in those days.
To be sure, many schools who had offered geometry and algebra began adding trigonometry, and then calculus to their college prep expectations, students who once stopped at sophomore biology would soon find themselves moving on to junior chemistry and senior physics. But no less effort was spent on beefing up the curriculum with courses in psychology and economics, broadening the offerings in history and literature, and offering preliminary courses in philosophy.
When I concluded my not terribly illustrious undergraduate education, I went to graduate school in philosophy financed by a the NDEA. NDEA meant I, too, was contributing to our nation catching up. I’m not sure my first-year students in Logic would have agreed, but Uncle Sam said so!
What politics, among other forces, had put together, politics could also put asunder, and the politics of the 1970’s began the slow march ahead of science and math and their applied studies and the slow decline of philosophy and literature and history—often the most popular majors of the 1960’s. In public schools under financial stress, the first programs to go were usually those in the arts.
By the new millennium, new global competition loomed as largely as had Sputnik a half-century before. For instance, for years the students who placed highest in international computer science competitions came from key American Universities, but by the early 2000’s, American students showed up as also-rans to students from India, China, and other Asian countries. The “hacking” scandals under current investigation would suggest we are still behind that eight ball.
Today’s response, however, is qualitatively different from that of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. It is different not because of its advocacy for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) but because today’s advocacy isolates those disciplines from their broad-based support in the series of core disciplines that make all other studies at least potentially successful and fruitful.
In film, one might recall, the “mad” scientist isn’t mad because he (in the films, at least, usually a “he”) doesn’t grasp science but because he grasps nothing else but science. He is Chesterton’s madman, mad not because he doesn’t reason but because he knows only reason. The result of our isolation of the STEM disciplines from their natural context is that we are now at the point where, as my son whose law practice engages him a lot in exchanges with engineers tells me, “They are just different from us, Dad.”
Any of you who have ever tried to talk with a techie about what’s wrong with your computer or cable hookup or cell phone connectivity can testify that the biggest problem is not that the techie might speak with a “foreign” accent, but that he (and it is still usually a “he”) will most certainly speak an entirely foreign language, the jargon of a field that has developed largely in pretty complete isolation from the disciplines that best teach us how to think, evaluate and communicate. (But, of course, “they” often speak with a “foreign” accent because their accent is not foreign to them or to where they were schooled!)
Just the other day I got a notice that my Smart TV is no longer smart enough for it to support my connection to U-Tube. At least that’s what I think it was telling me, although I can’t be certain because its language is not communicable to almost anyone who has not isolated themselves into the bubble of, say, computer science studies.
I think of the increasingly ignored and marginalized disciplines—and academic administrations and turf wars have a great deal to do with them being ignored and marginalized—as suitably gathered under the acronym HEART, an acronym that is meant to sum up the humanities and arts, and right off the bat you can see why they are vital to the STEM disciplines. In STEM, hypotheses, facts, theorems, and laws have one thing in common—they are not self-explanatory. Neither is their appropriate use. Like meaning itself, explanations come from context and the HEART disciplines give us fluency in context and thus in explanation, in making connections, in the determination of and achievement of purposes.
The “H” is for heuristics—a discipline that touches all academic fields. Some will call this “problem solving” but it is deeper than that because before you can solve a problem you have to know what a problem is and what a solution is. What does it even mean to have a problem or solve a problem? This conundrum in turn suggests protocols to guide our study, to determine the “vehicle” that will allow us to understand something, that will allow meaning to be conveyed. What kind of problem is best solved by a survey? by a story? by an analogy? by a figure of speech, by a laboratory test? What kind of representation (symbolic or literal, written or oral) are we engaged with and what are its rules—what has human experience taught us and how do we know? Heuristics is the hard-core matter of study in history and philosophy and literary criticism and law and psychology, just to name a few where their literature uses the term “heuristics” itself.
“E” is simply for ethics. Einstein told us the splitting of the atom had changed everything but our thinking, by which he meant it had changed all the “facts” of the world as they could now be understood but we had not caught up with that in our moral judgment, our processes of evaluation. Just for example, go to the curriculum history of your local medical, pharmaceutical, dental, or law college and find out the relative date in which a course on billing entered the curriculum and when a course in ethics entered it! Here, in our day, it seems the E should be expanding, not contracting. E for environment and our relation to it, so E for ecology as well. But, then, we will soon run into terms such as “the environmental imagination.” So on to “A”!
Since we are entering a labyrinth in which communication is not of the order of directions on a medicine bottle, “A” is for the arts, which alone teach us how to imagine and communicate the otherwise incommunicable. Mathematical formulae are wonders—powerful in their description of the world, wonderful as one of the world’s great languages. But they are useless in answering the question “How do I love thee?” For that we need hearts (and, not incidentally bodies) versed in music and dance, painting and sculpture, poetry and story, whip-stitching and gastronomy, comedy and tragedy, versed in all the variations on “twinkle, twinkle, little star” thank you Mozart.
“R” then is for Rhetoric…the art of communication itself…not a course but a curriculum (or a slant on any curriculum) in which we learn what moves people and what safeguards we need against being moved by humbug. Does anyone doubt that we need a new emphasis on rhetoric in our solipsistic times? When Edward P. J. Corbett and Dudley Bailey resurrected the ancient art of rhetoric, it was to create a more communicative environment for all studies, to replace the sheer cacophony of our times and give us new ability to formulate thought in ways vital to creating community.
And, now for perhaps the most controversial of all, “T” is for theology. I do not mean the teaching of a particular theology, such as a Thomist philosophy in a Jesuit school. A theology that does not question authority, question even existence, is not much of a theology. I mean it in the sense of one of Dostoyevsky’s characters who exclaims that all young Russia is ‘talking about God.’ They were talking, of course, about ultimate meaning, about what ultimately matters, about whether anything ultimately matters. They were talking about the kinds of sense of purpose that Victor Frankl pointed out often spelled the difference between those who perished and those who survived the camps. They were talking about something outside ourselves that makes others as important as we are. They were talking about whether there are considerations beyond personal aggrandizement. And, without talking about these things, how do we ever talk for long about ethics or rhetoric, heuristics or the arts?
[I’ve used this quote in previous posts, but it’s echoed elsewhere. For example, look even briefly at Jefferson’s principles for organizing his library and you will see the rudiments of the relationships among the disciplines and of those disciplines to Providence.]
Here, then is my thinking. Knowledge is power, and when the power differential among kinds of knowledge gets out of balance, then, in (probably) Aristotle’s words: It ain’t good. We do not want people well-trained in STEM who aren’t well educated in HEART any more than we want more clever bank robbers!
But that’s not all. I don’t think we can ultimately have people well-trained in the area of STEM if they are not steeped in the area of HEART. Mastery in STEM is neither possible or desirable without HEART. And my experience is that it doesn’t take much of a change in the status of the power “wattage” of each area to throw our learning and its usefulness out of whack. The evidence is all around us.
If you want a visual for my thinking (and it is so hard these days to choose): well, Martin Shkreli will do just fine. Admittedly, he may be yesterday’s poster boy…so rapidly do we descend when we are all STEM and no HEART.
Oh, by the way, speaking of power differentials: the power in Sputnik itself, the little globe that changed my life? About 1 watt!
Kearney, Nebraska
July 2017
{This blog will resume in September}
capeek 