STEAMing Ahead
The Case for Liberal Arts
Many people are working hard to increase the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) curriculum at all levels of education. This is of strategic importance as economies benefit from tech pipelines, maintaining strategic advantage in everything from national defense to global market leadership. However, it is important to remember the things that are deeply human and cannot be automated in this race toward the future. Let's add an 'A' for the liberal arts needed in our development. The intricacies of culture and language, critical thinking, telling a narrative, developing empathy, and the importance of knowing history before it repeats itself cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. Jonathan Levin, the Dean of Stanford’s Business School, echoed these priorities at a recent economic conference in San Francisco, implying that a heavy programming and STEM focus should be for those who are genuinely interested in following those specialties.
As innovation is an activity of finding the unexpected, it’s developed by knowing and experiencing the world around us to include those for which we are solving the problem. When asked how Mark Zuckerberg got to be so innovative, his mother touted all the random experiences and activities she threw him in during his formative years; everything from horseback riding camp to attending an inner-city art program. It isn’t a coincidence she didn’t highlight the coding classes.
A large part of this is breaking free from what Karl Duncker, the German Gestalt psychologist, calls functional fixedness. In this context, functional fixedness is a mental block against using an object in a new way required to solve a problem. This “block” limits the ability of someone to use provided components to complete a task as they are unable to move past the original purpose of those components. For instance, everyone on the Titanic entered the sinking ship problem from a nautical perspective. They could only think of the lifeboats as the resource to solve the saving passengers’ conundrum. Unfortunately for the 1,601 perished lives on that fateful day, no one considered the other readily available resources (tables, tires, etc.) and the possibility that the big floating Iceberg could constitute something more than a shipping hazard (hint: life-saving platform onto which to shuttle people).
Or similarly the experiment Dr. Duncker conducted in 1945 where a group of extremely intelligent people were given a box of thumbtacks, a book of matches and a candle, then given the task to attach the candle to the wall. They could only see the tack box as a box for tacks rather than a general container to hold things. We could dive into the two-cord problem, barometer question, and overcoming prototypes, but that would bring us away from the higher-level point of teaching our brains to question the world around us and embrace the undefined.
In addition to having that diverse exposure and ability to complete mental pivots, the introduction of culture, history and other languages further opens the mind and thus the possibilities for creativity to flourish. These can bear fruit in unexpected ways. During WWII, the allied coalition maintained control of Iceland and representatives spoke the language in order to learn that there was a several hour break in the rains hitting Europe. This allowed Churchill’s team to plan the exact time for D-day. Fast-forward 70 years to Iraq, those cultural awareness skills paid off by knowing that cabbages were grown in Basra. If there were cabbages in the market in Baghdad, then the route to Basra was clear. If there weren’t, then the roads were blocked by IEDs or insurgents. This seemingly simple detail saved many lives.
Storytelling has also changed the course of history. In school we all had to memorize Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address that captured the American national purpose. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” to this day is a timeless voice to our human hope for unity and equality. While Winston Churchill was a unique political creature, even by today’s standards, he provided an electric shock with “never give up” to the fighting spirit England desperately needed to maintain fortitude through the devastating battles to win the war. Even with the most robust natural language processing, the human spirit cannot be coded into a motivational speech when crises call. Capturing minds and hearts is a core capability that cannot take the back seat to digital prowess.
In the end, encouraging our next generation of the workforce to develop a deep love of knowledge with an inquisitive spirit is critical, with or without knowing Javascript, JSON, Python or whatever future computer language to come.