Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
A new theory of education, ideated by Georgette Yakman, has been on the rise over the last few years. It’s called “STEAM,” which stands for science, technology, engineering, art and math. The educational framework has been praised as a way to encourage multi-disciplinary thinking and emphasize the importance of the humanities. Unfortunately, it does exactly the opposite.
By trying to lump the arts in with STEM education, it implied the arts and humanities don’t have their own intrinsic value but rather only matter in the context of science and math. Instead of being encouraged to find meaning in the arts as its own discipline, students are being taught that they are more of an afterthought and that science and math should be the main focus.
This theory is detrimental to STEM education as well. STEM was initially coined as a way to reinstate interest in science and math education in schools and encourage young students to get excited about these fields. By introducing STEAM as a separate framework, it implies that STEM is not as interesting on its own and needs to rely on artistic applications to be engaging.
University President Wallace Loh has expressed his support for STEAM and stated that the University of Maryland is a “STEAM university” following a partnership with The Phillips Collection that made the art gallery more accessible to Maryland students. Ironically, Loh used the term incorrectly, as STEAM refers to a particular curriculum framework, not just the improvement of art and humanities education in general — something we should already be doing.
Clearly we need to focus on the arts and humanities to provide a well-rounded education. Many skills learned through one subject or discipline can be applied to others in unexpected ways. Learning to synthesize information and write clearly is a large focus of English and writing classes and is also extremely important to writing effective scientific lab reports. In return, learning about science and technology can help inspire artists to use new techniques in their work, like Georges Seurat who pioneered the use of pointillism after studying the scientific theory of color and optics. With STEAM, the nuances of each field are lost.
Students should be encouraged to make connections between different disciplines and apply them to real world situations. However, by teaching the connections before the concepts, students lose the pure foundational knowledge from each individual topic, as well as the ability to make those connections themselves. Trying to teach through STEAM is a terrible compromise that strips away the purity of math and science fields and the creativity and beauty of the arts, leaving us only with shallow knowledge of both.
Alyssa McKinney is a sophomore electrical engineering major. She can be reached at alyssa.cmck@gmail.com.
