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 In the efforts to explain the January chaos of the Capitol takeover, there will be all kinds of explanations and remedies, and one catch-all explanation word will be “education.” That word, like a number of words used in public discourse—“religion”, “environment”, “progress”, “human nature”, “the American People”,—means many different things, but today it usually means whatever happens in the schools, and much attention is given to what one thinks is or is not happening in the schools.

Today, of course, a day of Covid inspired disorder, is a day when whatever happens flips around from hour to hour, but we can look back a few months to some kind of pattern, to a time when a particular emphasis dominated public education, a time when there could be some  kind of agreement about what was happening in public schools

The problem with education, during that time, in the view of a great many people, is that the schools have been weak on teaching science, therefore if the schools taught more science, the world would be a better place.  After all, everything depends on science so if science is getting insufficient attention, then it ought to get more.  Since the early times of what now is often called the scientific revolution, our western culture exalted science, or at least promoted a popular approval of science. (worship is maybe too strong a word; maybe not).

That notion regarding the importance of science has worked out today so that we hear more and more of a particular curriculum that promotes, it is believed, scientific inquiry. This curriculum has picked up a name that  emphasizes four areas of study that, taken together, it is believed,  will bring more science into the schools and into the minds of the young. This curriculum has picked up the slogan of STEM: “science, technology, engineering and math”. If we want to think about our present troubles, about one of the great cultural influences, about the catch-all role of education, STEM is a good or bad place to start.

That STEM is good for true science is not, in my view, a safe assumption. I don’t see what engineering has to do with science, any more than assembling Lego pieces has to do with selecting the formula for the plastic used to make Lego pieces. Science needs math, of course, but math is not technology and engineering. It would be more accurate to hold that technology and engineering rest on science and math. STEM, then, is not STEM. It is partly STEM and partly something else, and the misleading slogan should not be used.