Dirty Vocational Subjects Sullying the August Disciplines

… I can’t tell if Virginia is being faceitious or not.  Probably not.  Brains are paramount in academics, they may as well be in jars.  I wonder what Matt Crawford would say about this article.


https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2019/09/there-is-no-stem.html
As one of those vocational teacher types the ‘august disciplines” have yoked themselves to, I’m once again thumped in the head with just how classist the education system is, but it was a bit of a shock to see WIRED advocating it.  I wrote about how there really is no such thing as STEM, at least in Ontario classrooms, in September.   Nice to see WIRED weighing in on the pedagogical smokescreen that is STEM, though I don’t think they disentangled it very effectively.


Mathematics (aka: ‘the great harmonies of the universe’) and science (“a byword for knowledge”) are pretty much all STEM are about when it comes to application in the classroom.  There has been no real movement on technology and engineering in the high schools where we are.  All STEM has done is paid for math manipulables and fund science.  Technology and especially engineering are still an afterthought at best.  If you’ve been fooled by the STEM smokescreen to think that there is any collaboration between those august disciplines and the filthy vocational teachers, you can relax, because there isn’t.  If you want to be an engineer in university, take science and maths courses, because that’s all there is in most high schools.


If you’ve ever wondered why technology students (and their teachers) feel disenfranchised in their own schools, WIRED has made that clear in this month’s edition…

An op-ed piece on how the august disciplines that have defined education since antiquity have yoked themselves to vocational fields, along with a cover article about one of those vocational types who dropped out of engineering to make things.  WIRED’s come here go away editorial stance is a bit hard to follow.

You’d expect academic types in The Atlantic to rip on skills based education in favour of their own university disciplines, but WIRED ripping on engineering and technology?  I’m at a loss to understand the end game there.

STEM is indeed nonsense, and I don’t disagree with a lot of what Virginia says about how the STEM smokescreen has gone down, other than to say that STEM never really happened at all for those of us at the bottom end of the educational value spectrum.


… because there isn’t.  It’s a just SM, as it’s always been: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2019/09/there-is-no-stem.html

 

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