STEM is in the air: why the concept is actually running on fumes. From the editorial:

The acronym, coined in the early 1990s, is pedagogical vapor. It Pasteur-pipettes into a flask all kinds of clashing and differently scaled fields of study, with no shared methodology or pedagogical tradition. Then STEM Bunsen-burns this brew to ashes and calls the precipitate “progress,” “rigor,” a “competitive edge,” and “gross domestic product.” And now, as parents of school-age kids have been told at least since 2001, STEM requires our reverence and our investment….

But first just tell me what STEM is. Above all, I want to know how science, a byword for all knowledge, and mathematics, the great harmonies of the universe—two august disciplines that have defined education since antiquity—yoked themselves to the vocational field of engineering and, worst of all, to “technology,” which could mean almost anything from space mirrors to VSCO girls. Technology is conceptually chaotic, even if the chaos can be glorious….

Far from clarifying the concept, government agencies have proposed simply saddling it with more sprawling disciplines, including psychology and economics. The Department of Homeland Security, it noted, included information sciences in STEM but excluded social sciences. It seems the only thing about STEM that policymakers could agree on is what the report calls “the relationship between STEM education and national prosperity and power,” and the significance of STEM to national security and immigration policy….

A few years ago, Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer-winning novelist and essayist, who won a National Humanities Medal in 2012, the year the STEM study came out, gave an interview in which she quoted her teachers: “You have to live with your mind your whole life,” she’d been told. “You build your mind. So make it into something you want to live with.”….

When all this is possible for a beginning student, what a shame it is for them to be pressed into service in an obsolete and inchoate conflict…. To submit to STEM, which is fundamentally an artifact of marketing, is to lose time, irreplaceable time, when you might be creating a mind, living in the harmonies of prime numbers and the elementary particles, and getting a chance at an unscientific notion that George Washington called happiness.

For other articles on STEM and humanities, see here.