STEM education is the seed of our future

Last week, I received an email where the writer asked: “Why do you promote STEM education but not others such as arts, music, humanity, history, etc.? A good education should focus on developing well-balanced persons, not workers for companies. Please comment.”

Answer: Today we are living in the world dominated by science and technology. Therefore, STEM education (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) are important to our people, our society, and country . It does NOT mean other fields that you mentioned are not important, but from the practical point of view, we want to make sure that our students can get a good job, build a good career, and contribute to our society.

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Today almost every country is focusing on improving their STEM education because they know that all the good jobs are in the science and technology. As educators, we need to ensure that our children, the future of our country, should NOT be allowed to get behind. When automation and robotics are changing the job market and impact everything, we cannot continue to depend on manual labor works because these jobs are disappearing. My question is why compete with robots on the job when you know that you will lose? Why not improving the education to focus on STEM to control these robots, make them follow your order (i.e., programming them)?

By focusing on Science, our students will be able to solve problems in our environment (i.e., pollution, waste disposals to the sea, floods, etc.) finding cures for diseases, improving agricultural crops and improve the standard of living of our people. By focusing on technology, our students will be able to automate our factories, improve our agriculture lands, increasing productivity, improving efficiency and developing new technology companies that can employ more people. I believe by having more people working in STEM fields; we can lift our people from poverty and improve our economy.

Because STEM education is important for our future, we need to encourage more students to study science and technology, but it does not mean we ignore other fields such humanity, arts, sociology, or history, etc. Students should learn more about our history, how our ancestors and past heroes had put so much effort to build our country. They should understand their responsibilities as children to the parents, as a member of the family to their ancestors, as citizens of their country, and a human to all humanity. What we are doing now is to invest in our future and the future of our country. What we do today will have a significant impact on the future of our children and our society, we must be conscious of our responsibility because we are planting the “seed for the future.”by promoting STEM education.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University

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