Don’t Get Scammed By So-Called STEM Education

The Federalist ^ | March 5, 2021 | Tony Kinnett

[Kaslin]

America's STEM classrooms are devolving — wasting valuable class time with toys, barely applicable coding games, and victim-mentality nonsense.

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If you ask any administrator about the future of education, he’ll likely mention the blending of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: STEM. Indeed, it’s so attractive to schools, billions of dollars are spent every year by corporations, startups, and the U.S. federal government in an 1850s-style “gold rush” of gadgetry and glittering lights.

To stand out from the competition and get into classrooms, curriculum developers, policymakers, and advocacy groups have begun to scam the education market by forsaking common-sense STEM principles in pursuit of colorful toys and Critical Race Theory dogma.

STEM education is in danger of no longer preparing the students of the United States for its future economy. Instead, it’s wasting their time by dangling the car keys of entertainment and social justice in front of young eyes.

State standards suggest STEM skills are built from scientifically understanding the world, competent use of technology, and the combination of engineering and mathematical fundamentals to assess problems and implement solutions. These are the honest goals of STEM, preparing students for the modern economy.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t sell. So major STEM curriculum companies like KinderLAB, 1st Maker Space, and Codelicious instead develop courses to teach kids only how to code and develop robots.

It sounds amazing, at first. “My child will be able to code a robot? Wow! That will prepare him for an amazing career.” What no one is telling that parent or student is that less than 2 percent of all jobs in STEM involve coding or robotics. What good is knowing how to code if 98 percent of STEM jobs don’t use it? If you only speak Icelandic, it’s unlikely there is going to be a massive market for your skillset in Cambodia.

Policymakers and advocacy groups are also attempting to bend STEM education into a different scam, the shimmering mirage of social justice. Major groups like the National Science Teaching Association assert women and minority groups are underrepresented in STEM fields in the United States and other Western nations, so someone must be discouraging these demographics from entering STEM while in school. The data shows that access and encouragement in STEM isn’t the problem, however. Many people simply aren’t interested in pursuing it as a career.

Former champions of science education have begun to demand that precious time be eaten up discussing the importance of gender and racial diversity in STEM, suggesting that what drives the technological advances of tomorrow, the economic powerhouse of the United States, and the developments in every field that change the lives for billions rests not in hard work, determination, skills, and tools, but one’s skin color and genitals.

The Racial Equity Institute and The Smithsonian are among many attributing the bedrock of quality STEM learning — perfectionism, a sense of urgency, the written word, and “only one right way — as white supremacy. In fact, if you aren’t teaching your students these social sermons constantly in STEM classrooms, you’re perpetuating “implicit bias.”

Unfortunately, such messaging has consequences. A surgeon who has been trained against perfectionists is a danger to her patients. A virologist who ignores the notes of his colleagues risks certain disaster. An air traffic controller without a sense of urgency risks lives. An engineer who ignores the “only one right way” of mathematical and structural principles might create a structure that wouldn’t be safe from a slight breeze.

What should STEM education look like? In short, we should require a series of skills that every student will use in the modern workforce. An electrician, programmer, radiologist, actuary, and civil engineer should be able to type, parse, and navigate any user interface, identify, and notate issues and probable solutions, calculate and manipulate variables, and communicate findings while working with others.

There are a wealth of examples of schools and programs accomplishing this daily. Vocational and trade schools give young minds hands-on experience in their field, while workshop and science courses give students opportunities to integrate mathematical and notation principles into operative tasks.

Why are so many public and private schools led down the paths of cheap entertainment and virtue signaling? It’s easy to create robotics and coding materials that sell. They captivate the imagination and eat up hours of instruction time, freeing teachers to let students sit at their devices and complete tasks governed by outside providers.

On the contrary, it’s a touch more difficult to convince schools that classical STEM skills and vocational training are worth their time. It demands an active educator to coach, create, critique, and troubleshoot. In reality, however, creating a genuine education experience that produces beneficial, long-lasting results for both students and society at large necessitates hard work, not flashy toys or catchy slogans.

The ultimate effects are obvious. How can we compete in the global economy if our STEM classrooms aren’t preparing our students to achieve new heights while we are wasting valuable class time with toys, barely-applicable coding games, and victim-mentality nonsense? The future of the American industrial, economic, and societal landscape rests on the training of bright minds, not their entertainment and moral preening.

Coding and robotics have their place in STEM curriculum. Robotics clubs and a chapter on coding provide valuable insights into possible careers, and a fun educational experience isn’t something to shun. Similarly, encouraging students regardless of heritage or sex to try STEM is a wonderful thing.

The current model has taken advantage of these two alluring facets to swindle parents and students into believing they are receiving real STEM education. All that glitters isn’t gold, and all that codes isn’t STEM.

[nascarnation]

Actually the guy also has equipment at his home base where he processes the sludge and sells as fertilizer.

Humanure

[softengine]

"Allowing insane, incompetent, and morally corrupt people to control any aspect of a nation is fatal ..."

Yes, it is. Nothing to do now except get ready for the last stages of this mess. There's no escaping the coming collapse, just surviving it.

[I want the USA back]

The insane obsession with “STEM” is expanding exponentially.

[FreedomNotSafety]

“Gifted” now works the same way. It used to be a place for exceptionally smart students to accelerate their studies. Now it’s a holding cell that retards the students progress until the others can catch up.

If you have a child in public school “gifted” be very leery of it.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

To paraphrase Euclid, “There is no royal road to Mathematics”.

The way I learned Algebra decades ago was to go to library after class and work through every problem at the end of each chapter, and check my answers against the answers in the back of the book. It was a lot of work, and no electronic gizmos would have helped me.

My parents didn't know anything about Math and the teacher was horrid, a mean nasty lady. Well back in the day, every town with a drugstore had a rack of paperback next to the magazines. You know them: Dell, Fawcett, Pocket Books. This was as close as most towns got to a bookstore. In those days paperback books were 15 or 25 cents, even 10 cents.

One day I saw a book on the rack called The Realm of Algebra by Issac Asimov. I bought it, and what the teacher was regurgitating could be understood with the help of Asimov. Algebra is simple if you have someone as brilliant as Issac Asimov explain it.

Anyhow, with Asimov's help, I persevered through the swamp and made it out the other side. I went on to higher mathematics later. But before you can do that you have to slog through Algebra. Master Algebra and the rest of Math falls into place.

[Pajamajan]

"Allowing insane, incompetent, and morally corrupt people to control any aspect of a nation is fatal ..."

"2+2=5 Winston"
(Orwell's "1984").

[Bruce Kurtz]

“I’ve seen other articles calling it STEAM or even STREAM by adding arts and reading to the technical cirriculum. Apparently some teachers are unhappy about not getting on the STEM gravy train.” Yes why not? Let’s add an “S” to STREAM and include all the Studies majors.

[Myrddin]

I have a brother that has a masters deg, he claims he can code in pasqual but has no understanding of binary, boolean logic or the like.

The language is Pascal, not pasqual. The early versions were cooked up at UCSD. It was a very academic and frankly a bit too "perfumed" as a language. HeathKit had a working release that ran on the H8 computer. I have a copy in a box somewhere and an H8 to run it. My memory board with 64k of DRAM had 4 rows of 4116 chips and onboard logic to refresh even when used with an 8080 CPU. I was frustrated trying to run the P-System because it was a memory hog. It occupied 48k of my 64k and exposed a defective component on the memory card...a cracked resistor. Once replaced, the P-System ran flawlessly, but it was still the same perfumed language. I preferred writing in C using the Software Toolworks compiler on that machine or raw 8080 assembly.

Roll forward from 1981, I'm re-engineering a large suite of software that was principally built using Java EE frameworks on JBoss in Linux. The new configuration will be all microservices wrapped in hardened Docker containers managed by Kubernetes. The staff working on this are my colleagues of 30 years. Most of us were principals in the original design of the code being ported. It's a bit of a "gray beard" festival. If you're not a hard-core software engineer, this is the wrong place to be.

[IYAS9YAS]

I have a brother that has a masters deg, he claims he can code in pasqual

I learned Turbo Pascal 25 years ago. It helped me understand programming basics, but I chose a different path. I still remember the very basics, and have wanted to dabble in Python, but it seems so very different today.

[Myrddin]

I love writing device drivers and mucking with kernel code. My largest project was backporting the multi-LUN SCSI drivers from HP-UX 9.0 to HP-UX 7 on a 68040. A bit messy coming of a byte-boundary designed code to make it work on 68k word boundaries. In addition the Spider X.25 level 2 and 3 drivers, a full Mentat System Vr4 streams port and a tunnel driver to hook the BSD TCP/IP network code into the Mentat Streams stack. All good fun. 275,000 lines of new code inserted into the kernel in 5 weeks. Deployed to the field to support the troops dealing with the big earthquake in Haiti.

[Kevmo]

This is an extremely well written article. Thank you for posting it.

[Kevmo]

2’s complement! I had completely forgotten about that little tidbit.

[Myrddin]

Python is a very good language. I've used it since the mid 1990s. Today, it is key to doing data science processing. The "pandas" package deals nicely with tabular data. To scale horizontally, add Apache Spark to distribute the work across a set of nodes. The Dask framework is also well used for those purposes. For machine learning, bring in the Keras framework with the TensorFlow support hooked to your nVidia GPU (on your video card) to offload the hard calculations.

Python can be slow and often we write modules in C that are directly callable from python for higher performance. To break from the multi-language mode, write in "Julia". You'll get both flexibility and performance along with portability.

[Westbrook]

Those were the days.
;)

[Basket_of_Deplorables]

Disagree with his analysis. You have to get kids interested to pursue any path well. Robots and early coding will do that. IS doing that. I see it around me. 9 year old kids writing phone apps—for real!

Coding is a big part of real engineering, too. And robots are complex electromechanical gizmos that are great teaching tools. Automation is a huge field of engineering.

[mylife]

How do we express negative #s in binary?

[Kevmo]

I wrote a utility for device driver software dudes. It converted a hexadecimal register dump into binary lookups on the datasheet and spit out what each individual bit meant.

I also generated the reverse tool, wherein you could enter hex code and see what that brings up in the binary datasheet, in essence looking directly at what your device driver told the device to do.

I did it in Excel. When I presented it, one of the engineers asked, “Why wasn’t this done in C++?” Because it was only ME generating it, the interface was widely available, easy to understand and you had direct access to the source code of each individual cell.

For it to be done in C, it woulda taken 5 programmers 3X as long and the bugs would never have been worked out before they moved on to some other project.

[Kevmo]

I remember it being done, but since I’ve never used it, I forget.

[IYAS9YAS]

Man. When did I get old? I feel like I’m Foghorn Leghorn and what you just wrote is like the smart little rooster plotting where the cannonball will land.

[Kaslin]

My grandson, who will be 15 this month taught himself to type, when he was 11 years old. He typed 80 words per minute. He’s probably typing close to 200 wpm now. I am lucky if I get 20 wpm, as my fingers are very clumsy. I have to look on my keyboard when I type.