STEMing the tide, part III: A (new) 'modest proposal'

We have been writing about the push in this country to strengthen the STEM subjects in education, science, technology, engineering and math, because of their financial, career, and material role in society. This is being done explicitly because when money is tight, subjects like the arts, humanities, and social sciences don't pay direct benefits.  This can be seen as inexcusably crass, but in a tight job market and culture increasingly embedded in things technological, with weakening public support for education, it is an understandable trend.

We  happen to be Luddites in this regard, perhaps, because we think that our society should not back away from the more literary, esthetic, and contemplative aspects of life.  This is not snobbery on our part, or at least not only that, thinking that everybody ought to love watching opera or reading the Iliad. The point is a societal one.  Much of our culture, such as pop music, sports, video games, chat sites, and the like are called 'popular' in part because everybody likes them (opera once was 'popular'). But the point here is that you don't need formal education to be exposed to them, indulge in them, or appreciate them for their values.

Appreciation of broader aspects of life, such as the 'finer' literature and arts, history, philosophical and anthropological thought, and the like is much more complex and often out of modern vernacular, technical, complex--even boring.  But exposure to them is as greatly enhanced by formal education, just as is the case for STEM subjects.  They have snob value in our social upper crust, but they have their aspects of value and appeal that might benefit and edify the lives of many more.

Here 'education' refers first to K-12. The current way to describe topics is to group the fashionable ones under the rubric STEM and then largely dismiss the others by omission--let them be nameless!  School districts are, we regularly read, shrinking or abandoning their music and arts programs, teaching of classics and the like, because they cost money, while adding pre-college specialty courses such as calculus. In a nutshell, this is based on our cultural obsession with money above all things, because these are the subjects, we are told, that industry wants and that make money for them and thus their employees.

But if being an industrial chemist or mechanical engineer pleases the wallet, we rarely hear that they please the soul.  We have not heard of a single serious-sized school district that has abandoned its sports programs, such as football or basketball, which are quite expensive, to augment the arts.

Universities and perhaps many colleges, are racing onto (or is it 'down' to?) the same money-driven bandwagon. Abandoning part of their mission to 'educate' informed citizens, they are widely shrinking or even sometimes running completely away from the non-STEM areas (but not, of course, football or basketball).

The scientific data on successful, healthy aging
I just returned from a workshop at the National Research Council, underwritten by NIH's National Institute on Aging (NIA), to discuss what we have learned about the basis of longevity and healthy lifespan experiences.  An objective was to provide advice to the NIA on directions of future ways to invest their resources, based on what we have learned from what has been supported heretofore.  The results, in a central area related to the question at hand, were in fact major and clear--and should provide equally clear directions for future NIA investment.

Health is a biological phenomenon (even mental health, of course, since the mind is a biological organ). The approach to human lifespan, longevity, health and life-course experience relates to the causes of negative as well as positive experience.  We should use our research technologies to find and identify the causes of either, so we can intervene with the negative and reinforce the positive.

In this case, the working model, in our scientific age that puts technology first, has been that ill health causes social and psychological decline. If you are sick, a biological and in that sense technical state, you cannot hold a job, may be involved in abusive domestic situations, become depressed, then invest badly in food or other resources and the like.  If you are sick, you may be more likely to be overweight, shorter, more likely to drink too much or to smoke.  So we have a plague of people in whom to search for the misguided cells, so we can alter their behavior.

Surprisingly, however, the reported research has shown, rather clearly and in both humans and other animal models (in particular, findings in other primates in the wild were reported at this meeting), that quite the opposite is true:  Social standing and cultural milieu are major, primary determinates of life-course health and experience. This even moreso than money itself!  Longevity and even height is in a strong sense determined by the degree of satisfaction or control you feel in your life, your social position, and even physical resources (incomes) do not over-ride the social effects.  Excepting of course strong harmful genetic effects in a small fraction of people, disease and lifespan causal are mediated largely by these aspects of social environment which, in turn, affect your health prospects. If you're born on the wrong side of the tracks, you're fate is largely sealed.

Since similar results were reported in several aspects and respects and even other species, one need not worry about the details, which seem to be generally small relative to the main picture.  The details needn't be studied to death.  Instead--we paid for the research, the research was very carefully and well done, and we got a clear result!  The question has largely been answered, and we now know how best to invest future resources most effectively for life-course improvement.

But the answer will surprise you!

Our 'modest proposal'
In 1729, Jonathan Swift saw a problem of the widespread lives of poverty among the downtrodden in Ireland, and suggested a solution:  they should gain income by selling their excess children (of which there were many), to be cooked in various culinary ways to satisfy the rich.  Many savory recipes were provided.

Carve, saute, and don't forget the sauce.  Drawing by Dore

That essay was a vicious satirical critique of societal inequity in Swift's time, and we (living in more civilized times, we generally suppose) would never think to suggest that kind of solution to the offensive, growing inequity in our society today.  But we do have a modest suggestion for today, based on our National Institutes of Health living up to its word, and using the results of research it sponsors to improve our society's lot.

The non-STEM parts of our educational system address quality of life issues that have to do with your assessment of the world, sense of well-being, ability to integrate understanding of civil life and across different realms of human thinking.  People with higher levels of senses of integration and well-being will be better able (as the research shows) to negotiate society and this will lead to better prospects and better health and longer life.

Of course, knowledge of the STEM subjects is important in this.  But we are already pouring resources there, clearly with more to come.  But we are pulling the plug on the non-STEM subjects that are associated with giving you a shot at being on the better side of the tracks--better and more equitable places in society, and which, we now know thanks to NIA research, lead to longer and healthier lives. This quantitatively and qualitatively trumps the relatively smaller, and consequent rather than causal effects of the various high-technology, costly things we spend funds on in relation to the pandemic diseases like heart disease, stroke, obesity-related diseases and so on.

So: what the NIA should do is to redirect its funds from these very sexy technological research approaches to life-course issues (like GWAS and so many other Big Data fashionable fields), and urgently pour these resources instead into intervening in the actual major causes of impaired lives.  NIA should underwrite the improvement of K-12 education nationwide, and should endow non-STEM programs in universities, conditional on those areas being retained as serious-level requirements for graduation.

If we let this recipe cook for a decade or two we'd have a more sophisticated, knowledgable, intellectually resourceful and more savory equitable society with more peace of mind.  And the populus would, as a direct consequence, have more intellectual resources to engage in creative and innovative science and technology, with the economic benefits that go with that. As a result, the rates of our common chronic diseases, including mental deterioration, and their associated misery and costs would be way down.

The diseases that would be left would be the truly biological or genetic or clear-cut environmentally caused instances of these diseases, on which cases focused research (rather than just big-data collection) might have a reasonable shot at devising cures and prevention.

That is our modest proposal for how we should use the results of the research we pay for (but we dare to suggest that it's not how we're using them now).

As remarkable as science, and as unremarkable as most science

Last Saturday we went to the opera---well, to the Met's live broadcast to local movie theaters.  It was Puccini's La Boheme, an amazing, remarkable feat, the match of anything in science.  But there was even more.

With something like 4 hours' notice, Kristine Opolais, an up and coming Latvian singer, who had sung the lead in Puccini's Madama Buttefly the night before, and got no sleep, got a message early in the morning asking if she'd sing the lead role, Mimi, in La Boheme at that day's matinee, because the expected lead was ill with the flu.  For some insane reason, she agreed.  In front of a full Met House and estimated 300,000 worldwide viewers, with closeup camera scrutiny, she delivered an essentially flawless, gorgeously moving performance.  It was doubly or trebly moving because of the feat of switching roles, remembering all the musical words and cues and notes, and learning the staging with almost no notice.

Ms. Opolais and Vittorio Grigolo in the Metropolitan Opera's broadcast of Puccini's “La Bohème” on Saturday. CreditMarty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera .

Whatever might be mitigating circumstances (she's sung Mimi in other houses in recent years), this tour de force reinforced our respect for the nonSTEM aspects of human life.  Nothing we have seen in decades of science matched what we saw, for skill, technique, and all the learned aspects of high levels of human achievement.  This reflects the reasons we think universities should stop backing away from training anyone but scientists.

And then….  We are in Washington this week for a science meeting, but had some spare time and went to the National Art Gallery.  A big ad boasted that a new Van Gogh painting had been acquired and was on display.  Naturally, we went to see it, rushing past some other magnificent French impressionist paintings.  And what did we see?  Well, art is subjective, but this was under-whelming.  A blob of typical Van Gogh slap-dash.  We are sure the Gallery paid more for that than most of us earn in a lifetime.

Van Gogh, "Green Wheat Fields," Auvers, 1890

Yes, an investment in 'art', and maybe relevant to understanding a major artist's life.  But to us, as we quipped to each other, like a famous scientist's papers in a grade-B journal.  Not a masterpiece.  Yet, the worship of the Established leads to that purchase, much as too many journals and too many 'science' reporters, tout the every work of someone with a prominent reputation or job in a university near to Big City.

We, personally, have the utmost respect, or even awe, for any great human achievement, and the work and skill that are responsible.  The same is true for an art performance, a novel, a historical analysis, or, yes, even a scientific discovery.  But it is also true that most work in most fields is ordinary, yet we give it bloated treatment if it may show that we hob-nob with the famous.

Inspired works of human endeavor are deeply moving, in any field.  Science is among them, but brilliance is not restricted to science, and the experience of brilliance is something that should be open to everyone; the more who are educated to appreciate it, the more whose lives will be edified by the experience.

STEMing the tide, part II

Our country is hurting when it comes to domestically trained first-rate science talent.  Our educational system is dropping the ball in many very well-documented ways.  K-12 is processing students who are poorly trained in basic reading and writing skills, as well as in numeracy and synthetic or analytic thinking, but who then go on to college or university.

When we get them, too many are not ready for serious level college work.  But we, too, at least big universities, have a business-model-based pass-through behavior and we give diplomas to a lot who probably cannot spell 'diploma' (much less 'sheepskins').  We know we are doing this, but are too cowed by budgetary fears to do our duty and address the problem.  Indeed, big money is being disproportionately invested in fancy rec buildings and well-appointed dormitories to attract students, over ways to improve education, which won't.

These are not secrets.  In some realms, such as what are known as STEM areas, basically science and technology, that have important commercial and other important roles in our society, there is a widely reported serious shortage of skills and knowledge, at least in students trained here.

We live in a highly technological society, for good or ill, and this is important.  But our country is so money-oriented and materialistic, short-sighted and soaked in a business ideology, that the stress on the genuine need to upgrade our STEM training is systematically squeezing out other subjects, such as language, history, society, the humanities, and arts.

The lack of value given to these non-monetary-related subjects is not even a new problem, as we recently wrote.   Our society simply hasn't got the ability to put limits on short-term material interests. This, even though understandably, with a very democratic, open-to-all system, which is likely a very good and enviable thing, we cannot expect every student to be a Darwin or Einstein, or even to give a damn about becoming an 'educated' person.  Most, naturally, want a job (and, before that, a few years of debauchery).

We have taught science, real science as best we understand it, for decades, and certainly know that better STEM-subject background would substantially improve what and how most students think.  The best are terrific, and while not everyone can be the best, they can be better.  Science can be taught in its context and students exposed to diverse subject areas, and subject types, can generally, and perhaps especially for the brightest, become more innovative and creative citizens.

But synthetic and integrative thinking, as manifest by many or perhaps even most of the very best scientists, is a hallmark of real creativity.  Science papers that hide a lack of substance beneath layers of impressive STEMming are, to us, quite rife and a costly societal problem, as we often write.

But, even in the US, there is more to life than one's job, something the 'Protestant ethic' too often leaves behind.  And, at the end, thoughtful people who are very successful at STEM, often reflect that they've paid a price--missed opportunities for edification, that cannot be reclaimed.  We have one life, and we should treat it as a precious gift not to be needlessly restricted.

Here is how one Charles Darwin (no fan of universities) put it, in his autobiography:

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Our country is hurting, yes, but it's not just because not everyone can do calculus.  It's because too many are seeing too little, too late,  of the world they're going to rent for a while.

STEMing the educational tide? Aldo Leopold on professoring

Aldo Leopold was a naturalist and conservationist who wrote many things for pubic consumption as well as being a leader in academic conservation research. His writings, especially perhaps in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (orig. 1949, repub. 1987, Oxford), are widely admired for their poetic depiction of wilderness and living nature, and his lament about what we are doing to it.

We often write about the role of science in current society. One issue is the way science and technology don't just contribute to society but in a sense tyrannize it, as predators working with the commercial sector to popularize technological solutions to every problem. The largely government-funded university research system is a common target of our criticism because of the way it perpetuates and feeds itself, advocating myths of its effectiveness far beyond what we think is the reality (and we write of the media who are willful participants in this system), and abnegating performance standards for the students on whose tuition universities also rely.
 

Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948

But perhaps this, while rampant if not out of control, is less new than we have thought. Here is what Leopold had to say, back in 1949, 65 years ago:

"There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra.  These men are called professors.  Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.

A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another. And if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.

Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands.  One by one the parts are thus stricken from the song of songs.  If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.

Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world.  Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view.  This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.  One of the facts hewn to by science is that every river needs more people, and all people need more inventions, and hence more science; the good life depends on the indefinite extension of this chain of logic.  That the good life on any river may likewise depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive, is a form of doubt not yet entertained by science. " ( pp 153-4.)

Today, we are moving more rapidly away from integrated thinking than the Colorado rapids move through the Grand Canyon. Our romance with the brand-named STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) sounds so knowing, but is really a brand-name for universities going headlong after tuition and research money by essentially asserting that what brings in money is what education is all about.

Rafting the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon: Wikipedia

For what are largely fiscal rather than intellectual or academic reasons, we're moving headlong away from the arts, humanities, and social sciences towards every impersonal, stainless-steel subject that can bring in the green and churn out the technocrats.

We are not here mooning for some mushy idea of elite intellectualism. But life is more than money and machinery, and these edifying subjects are more than just ways to spend dull, soporific evenings at concerts. Much of science is certainly driven or even enabled by technology, and much that we want as citizens is produced by technology. But some of the best, most transformative science comes from synthesis of ideas across thought-areas, even including non-technical ones. That's at least in part because a well-balanced life can expose one to diverse ideas and in a sense sow the seeds for creative innovation.

But universities, in their short-sighted and often self-interested ways, are rushing away from departments and disciplines that don't 'pay', towards the STEM subjects that spin dollar signs in front of deans' and provosts' eyes. Course distribution and degree requirements are being watered down, given fancy 'integrative' names that don't really seriously integrate broad knowledge (still, sometimes, known as 'liberal arts' education), and through-puting students the way a factory through-puts boxes of soap (except, perhaps, that a factory upholds some quality standards, rejecting substandard boxes). We are not making up this dissolution of standards, but do stress the thin and venal rationale that typically underlies it.

This is stifling. Society should wake up to the wholeness not just of Nature but of life generally, because one might say that people do not live by cellphones alone. The liberal arts taken seriously is a serious way for people in a privileged society such as ours to have a more deeply satisfying life. We as a society should reinforce the idea of a broad, general education, and stem the venal aspects of the STEM tide that will overtake us if we're not diligent, if it hasn't already irrevocably done so in ways Leopold was bemoaning before most of us were even born.