STEM and the Third Culture: A Case for Interdisciplinary Education

Today’s post is courtesy of Claire Willett of softartisans.  You can find Claire’s blog here, or follow her on Twitter ( @softartisans ).  A couple weeks ago Claire posted an interview with my friend Jes Borland ( blog | @grrl_geek ) which sparked an email exchange.  Claire asked if I would participate (of course I said yes…I just need to finish answering her questions!) and I invited her to write something that I could post here.  Claire’s content speaks for itself, so without further ado…

[Note: Erin initially asked me to write about mentoring, and I asked if I could write about the need for interdisciplinary education instead. (And then treated her to the lengthy screed below.) I’m very grateful to her for letting me soapbox on borrowed turf, and welcome your comments, thoughts and criticisms!]

America is having a STEM crisis, I hear. There is great need for engineers and a dearth of qualified applicants, forcing employers to outsource, ramp up international recruitment or move.  On the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the US ranked 25^th in math and 17^th in science. A recent OECD study with Stanford University projected that a boost in PISA scores could translate to economic gains in the tens of trillions of dollars over the span of the students’ lifetime. But right now, these students are building sugar cube castles while their Asian, German and Scandinavian counterparts are using Lattice QCD to calculate the properties of hadrons. A year before the PISA rankings came out, President Obama announced that America needed more hadrons and less sugar. His “Educate to Innovate” campaign is pumping $260 million into STEM teaching programs and his Race to the Top fund provides financial incentives to states that commit to improving their STEM education efforts.

I think the president is right about the urgent necessity of fixing a failing system, but I don’t think more standardized testing and an influx of specialized teachers is the solution. Or rather, I think we need more teachers, but they should be teachers who love physics and English, biology and art, anthropology and philosophy. We need an education model based on what E.O. Wilson calls “consilience”: a unity of knowledge, a linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines. Why? Three reasons: communication, myopia and wider appeal.

A technologist who can’t communicate his ideas and findings to a less informed audience can only have so much influence. The most influential scientists, engineers and mathematicians, from Galileo and Descartes to Watson and Cronin, are also excellent writers. Leonardo DaVinci painted the Mona Lisa and drew up plans for the precursor to the helicopter. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made environmentalists out of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek turned me from entomophobe to entomophile.

Likewise, without outside context and the perspective that comes with it, a technologist’s discoveries and teachings are limited, sometimes dangerously so. A while back, the New York Times published a story on the difficulty modern medicine has in treating multimorbid patients. Everyone’s a specialist and as Dr. Mary E. Tinetti, a geriatrician at Yale Med told the Times, “very often, there is nobody looking at the big picture or recognizing that what is best for the disease may not be best for the patient.” This isn’t a post on the molecularization of medicine, but it is a post on what the molecuralization of medicine says about the state of the sciences in general. Without a more holistic academic approach, there can be no Occam’s Razor.

The inverse of this, of course, is that by changing the way we teach science so that it incorporates the humanities, we’re also expanding its appeal. Growing up, most of the kids I knew liked math and science or they liked language arts and history (or they liked gym). I fell into the humanities camp, but I do remember the one week in AP Bio we spent reading Watson’s The Double Helix. “One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”

The only science class I really liked was Biocultures, the study of biology as a cultural construct and culture as a biological one. I liked it because it took science out of its fortress and made a case for the personal and situational, for looking at the sick instead of the sickness, the human instead of the cell. For four months, we researched illness narratives and met with former heroin addicts,  watched Paris is Burning and read The Cyborg Manifesto. I came away from the class knowing a little about chronic illness, a little about gender performativity, a little about the change from “illness” to “disease.” I don’t remember all of it, but I don’t remember anything about stoichiometry.

Walter Percy wrote that the student best equipped to see the embalmed dogfish lying placid on his desk is the one expecting “Sonnet XLIII.” I’d like to tweak that a little bit: the student best equipped to see the dogfish is the one who’s read and loved “Sonnet XLIII,” because this student can look at the dogfish and say “How would thy shadow’s form form happy show/ To the clear day with thy much clearer light/When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!”

Give a steady diet of Shakespeare and dogfish, our kids just might boost our PISA ranking—and save its future.