We live in an affluent suburb with excellent schools, and as such, we get a lot of messages about extra-curricular programs designed to supplement our kids’ education. Over the many years we’ve been doing this (The Pip is in fifth grade, his final year of elementary school (yikes), and SteelyKid is three years older), I’ve noticed a bit of message creep in these that has gotten kind of silly.
Back when SteelyKid started out, the enrichment program messages mostly focused on “STEM,” the acronym for “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.” That’s already grouping together some things that are a slightly uneasy fit— writing code and lab science are pretty different— but it’s fairly coherent, and in a system where science is a couple-times-a-week subject in school, it make sense as a focused extra program.
Very quickly, these started to shift toward “STEAM,” with the “A” standing for “Arts.” This is significantly less coherent— art and science are very different sorts of activities and often appeal to different people— but I’m mostly okay with it as a way to get a slightly broader range of kids (and parents) thinking about science. And arts are another once-or-twice-a-week subject, so some extra opportunities again make sense (though it should be noted that there are arts-only enrichment programs, with no science component).
In the last couple of weeks, though, we’ve gotten emails about a “STEEAM” enrichment program. Not only is that not a word, it’s a turduckronym: the added “E” is short for “ELA,” which itself stands for “English and Language Arts.” At this point, it’s not a focused enrichment program, it’s just extra school— the only thing not being enriched here is social studies. And, honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me to see emails a year or two from now about “STEEHAM,” adding an “H” for “history” and getting us toward an Upstate New York (but not Utica) delicacy.
This is of a piece with a recent tendency to demand a kind of unwieldy expansiveness from everything. You can’t just teach some cool stuff about a particular area of science, you’ve got to include some arts, and advance social justice, and how can you not mention climate change?
This springs from an impulse that’s understandable and basically good, but look, not every person is interested in all those things at the same time. And that’s perfectly fine. It’s okay to do one thing at a time, and go into greater depth together with the subset of people who are genuinely interested in and focused on that one thing. Then you can get your breadth by going deep on several different subjects at different times. Or not— there’s nothing actually wrong about not studying an area you don’t find engaging, whether that’s abstract art or abstract algebra.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much in favor of broad education— I’ve chosen to spend most of my adult life in elite liberal arts colleges, after all. But I favor a model of liberal arts education where students study multiple topics each in some depth, not one where we smush everything together into an indistinct muddle. There’s more value, to my mind, in learning a lot about a handful of fairly coherent topics in different disciplines, even if there are gaps between them, than covering a more comprehensive set of topics in a superficial way. What matters is not so much the specific content as learning how to learn deeply about different areas— once you know that, you can fill in any subject-matter gaps as the need arises. I don’t think you get the same benefit from skimming very lightly over a huge range of stuff.
Different people are interested in different things, and that’s okay. If you want to enrich education, it’s perfectly appropriate to leverage those different interests: run a coding program for the kids who like computers, a nature program for the kids who like bugs, a drawing program for the kids who are into art, etc. There will almost certainly be some overlap, and that’s great, but diluting all the subjects to pull them all into a single class is just silly.
I toyed a bit with a more provocatively Two Cultures-y approach to this, but it would be tricky to write in a way that wouldn’t piss people off needlessly, so I ended up here. I may yet take a run at it, so if you want to see that, here’s a button:
If you know somebody else who might like it, here’s another:
And if I’ve already needlessly pissed you off, I’ll leave the comments open.
STEEHAMPUNK: science engineering ELA arts history math pre undergrad nonexclusionary knowledge.