My post from mid-June about... well, I just read it, and who knows what it was about, but anyway, that post had some ideas in there about the way STEM education, often closely linked to the importance of educating young people about the critical role of scientific thinking, tends to fail in terms of educating students about a crucial life skill - making decisions within uncertainty. It suggests the natural conclusion that these courses should therefore focus on addressing this shortcoming, but I think there is another way to think about the problem. What if the role of subjects such as history, English, or art, previously described in ways that justify their importance alongside the supposed superiority of STEM-centric curriculums, was instead framed as a necessary supplement to the technical aspects of STEM coursework? The distinction, in a word, is uncertainty - STEM classes would retain the illusion of certainty as a necessary evil for the greater good of teaching technical skills while the other courses would have the task of educating students to thrive in situations defined by uncertainty.
Of course, this mentality will require its own type of rethinking in the context of non-STEM classrooms. I remember a lot of examples from my own student days of such classes focusing on the facts and figures of the subjects, with certainty often implied in the way materials were presented to us. It could be necessary for history classes to regularly debate the merits of decisions rather than merely study the details of events, or for English finals to offer essay prompts such as "Did you think Romeo and Juliet was any good? Explain." The idea that I have for education, whether it ultimately be the task of non-STEM courses or not, is to find ways to introduce students to uncertainty at an early educational stage. My fear is that if students are not prepared for uncertainty, they will not be prepared for the real world, where following the science means a process that only leads us to the crossroads of a necessary decision.
