STEM is not …

STEM is not STEaM or STEaMie. STEM is reserved for corporate workforce development. There is no room at the top for Art in STEAM or Including Everyone in STEAMIE. STEM is first and always elite. Pass a year or two of college calculus if you want admission to anything beyond third grade. Of course that should read third class. Mastering the mechanics of solving numerical or symbolic problems is the sine qua non of admissions to elite education. Ordinary numeracy is out ranked and out modded by even the foundations of algebra and geometry, which are no longer enough. The elite can sit still for a year to master what Nobel laureate Richard Feynman delivered on the back of a napkin. But then, perhaps what Feynman actually conveyed was not a year of calculus but something to think about, deeply or not at all. It may be OK to just say or ask “so what?” Even Feynman acknowledged that what is on the back of the napkin left gaps that posed questions. Our world is swimming in important questions that challenge our humanity. For the most part, corporations don’t really care. STEM and SHITT don”t mix well.

STEMM is a recent effort to add Marketing to STEM because it would foster greater gender equity and enable women to advance to the c-suite of corporations where they become responsibly enmeshed in the profit and loss side of firms. An article in Forbes suggests that Marketing should be a part of STEM, as STEMM education, with a conclusion that it may be a better way to attract and promote women and achieve real gender equity. The argument carries some intrigue to overcome societal inertia embodied in dearly beloved corporations.

Women in the workforce have been denied access to the c-suites of firms by about 1 female position for 9-10 male positions. It is a trending reality that the golden escalator to the business tower is through marketing with product development from patent to profit a cachet. Combined with financial acumen the sales person is the progenitor of everything inside and outside of corporate capitalism. Nothing happens until a sale is made. Big or small, sales in aggregate drive our contemporary economy. IF you want to take a great idea forward, get some advice from a successful salesperson. Sales is a very worthy pursuit, leaving aside the ethics of the current occupant of the White House.

The corporate elite rely on a workforce to deliver for the corporation. Inherent in the workforce is capacity to create, that is CREATE, Computing, Robotics, Engineering, Arts, Technology and Energy. CUTE! Collaborating, Utility, Technology and Empathy may be a more likely way to advance humanism. But then CUTE may be Clever, Utility, Trumps, Efficacy. In the c-suite lunchroom, the managers of corporations know that Science (chewing up dogmatic assertions), Technology (swallowing computing), Engineering (savoring electro-mechanical robotics to chew on human worker replacement) and Mathematics (gulp down algorithms, databases and statistical inferences with a big dose of logic and a huge helping of calculus). The mantra, of course, is that getting to the moon without calculus and attaining medical miracles without DNA is impossible, which, in fact, it is. Hardly anyone gives a shit about history, philosophy and the dashing of dogmas that led to either calculus or DNA. History may reveal that Anthony Fauci takes no back seat to Descartes or Newton in mollifying imperial power.

Corporate America and our capitalism have sold us a line of STEM and it may be that we are socially F’ed. My acronym du jour is Faked Utility of Computed Knowledge Enables Degeneration. That is inevitable when the baby of common sense is excluded with the water, soil and air upon which life, and our humanity, depends.

Recently I’ve bee toying with a new acronym, SHITT = Science Humanities Innovation and Technology Tolerance … picking up one end and expecting it to be clean. Good luck!