“Who cares?” and “Why do I need to know this?” are not just tired student mantras to be brushed aside by frustrated teachers. They are the questions about significance that lie at the heart of our work. It is unfortunate, then, that the utilitarian calculus underlying so much of the thrust in education during the past few decades — privileging No Child Left Behind testing and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) proficiency — fails to offer a meaningful response to the needs of our students and our nation in the 21st century.
At a time of both international economic recession and unprecedented global competition, educators and policy-makers too often pursue utility at the expense of meaning. It’s understandable, but also misguided. We live in an era of democratic revolutions, broadening debates about replacing GDP with better measures of national well-being, pressing bioethical conundrums, and increasing environmental challenges that require action. These and other realities of modern life indicate that narrow utility and standardized metrics are insufficient educational responses to the issues of our day. We can’t just prepare students to fit into the world as it is. We need them to have the knowledge and skills to change it for the better.
Given this need, now is the time — and independent schools are the ideal places — to reimagine education so that it combines utility and meaning. Specifically, it’s time to abandon the easy comfort of our disciplinary siloes and embrace cross-cultural, transhistorical, and genuine interdisciplinary learning. All learning has cultural context — and we hurt our students and ourselves by pretending otherwise. In this era of immense possibility, for better or worse, we can best help our students by assuring that meaning shares the spotlight with utility. And to assure that meaning is central, we need to insist that the humanities combined with comprehensive global education play a central role in our programs.1
Humanities for 21st-Century Humanity
By not setting disciplinary knowledge in a larger context, our education system prizes the technological and utilitarian. It overlooks the critical need for meaning that students require in order to grow and thrive as democratic citizens. It ignores the social-emotional elements of learning that ignite creativity and lead to well-being. Recognizing these shortcomings, a growing number of educational leaders, experts, and policy-makers now argue that the best education is not simply a tool of GDP and a competitive workforce but, as Andrew Delbanco puts it in his recent book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, “a hedgefund against utilitarian values.”2
An integrated, balanced education in humanities and STEM prepares students for citizenship and leadership roles in a world in which they will need to assess and debate economic, technical, scientific, and moral questions that have profound consequences for all of us. To nurture a better dialogue across the entire range of academic disciplines, educators should begin to ask new and more probing questions as they create curricula that help acknowledge the generative link between STEM and the humanities. Where would engineering and human invention be without the beauty and creativity of the arts? How would communities thrive without historical knowledge of the archetypes conveyed in great literature? Where would scientific and technological advances be without Socratic inquiry? How can we develop a moral compass in life without a careful study of history and literature?
Questions like these are precisely why John Maeda, president of The Rhode Island School of Design, argues that we should add an “A” (for Art) to STEM and make it STEAM. The benefits of marrying art to engineering are seen everywhere — from our ever-evolving gadgets to the human-made environment around us, including artist and physicist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, imaginative new “life forms” that, fed by the wind, freely roam beaches in Holland. But the most important reason to integrate the humanistic and the global into STEM education is to ensure that we have citizens who live meaningful lives, and direct technology and cultural systems toward healthy human ends.
By insisting on the arts and humanities, we are not suggesting that schools revert to classical education. STEM courses matter greatly. Educational technology offers enormous opportunity for deep learning. But we believe educators should revisit the roots of classical education and re-weigh its value — when paired with global education — in our efforts to improve schooling in the 21st century.
In her book Not for Profit, University of Chicago professor and philosopher Martha Nussbaum does just that, framing her support of the humanities in the context of democratic global citizenship:
Apart from economic gain, a system of education (both K–12 and higher education) needs to prepare students for rich and meaningful lives, and — my primary focus — it needs to prepare them for democratic citizenship…. For democracy to survive, young people have to learn to argue and deliberate....Yale law professor Anthony Kronman, author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, furthers the argument by suggesting that the humanities are particularly well-equipped to help us re-examine “what we care about and what we value” in an era when mismeasured valuations have led to, among other things, a global financial meltdown.4 We suggest that the very qualities that create a meaningful experience in school are the same qualities that will make work and life more meaningful.
The second skill a system of education must develop is the ability to think about groups other than one’s own, both inside and outside the boundaries of one’s own nation, understanding the implications of policy choices for lives of many different kinds.
Finally, woven through all of this must be a cultivation of the ability to think from the perspective of another person, what we might call the sympathetic imagination. We all are born with this capacity in a rudimentary form, but if it is not trained it will remain crude and highly uneven….3
Independent schools have a special opportunity and responsibility to be forward-thinking voices in modeling education that does not promote economic competition at the expense of our democratic responsibilities and human potential. Understanding the long-term gains and losses of the decisions we make for our students today is not easy work. But maintaining age-old traditions — such as encouraging the Socratic dictum about living an examined life of self-discovery — can guide our work as educators even in the most complex times.
Dynamic Schools
How do we make this shift for which Nussbaum advocates? First, we need to acknowledge the heart of the problem. The fragmentation of learning and academic specialization that began in universities and trickled into our classrooms contributes to a lack of dynamism in our subjects, which, in turn, prevents too many teachers and students from considering the question of significance in education.
Currently, teachers in STEM subjects appear to underscore the significance of their courses better than humanities teachers do, in part, because STEM teachers benefit from the technology that is so integral to modern life. At the same time, too many humanities teachers turn away from technology as a useful teaching tool, increasing the mistaken feeling that the humanities were designed for education in an earlier era, but not for today or tomorrow. Culturally, we are also prone to believing that STEM subjects are uniquely geared to help students become 21st-century problem solvers. However, we should remember that although innovators and problem solvers like Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, and Albert Einstein were enabled by their STEM studies, they were inspired and guided by the humanities. In short, they needed both approaches in order to reach their breakthroughs in knowledge. And our students need both.
Harvard’s Tina Grotzer has found that definitions of the “habits of mind” required for success in math and science sound as much like Socrates as they do Newton: (1) openness to and appreciation of new ideas, (2) skepticism and appreciation for evidence, (3) consideration of alternatives, (4) creative use of imagination, (5) curiosity, integrity, diligence, and fairness.5 And new brain science research indicates that reading great literature improves our problem-solving skills just as much as computer simulations do, according to Keith Oatley, emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto.6
If we do not ask questions about the deeper content that we teach in our classrooms — about how we help students form these habits of mind and then apply them to everything they study — the education students receive will be a pale imitation of what they need. Do we study scientific developments in relation to the religious and cultural factors that gave rise to them? Do we set historical discussions of political movements in the context of economic and scientific trends today? Do we examine both the social and biological impact of plagues while comparing them across history and cultures? Questions like these better represent the realities and challenges of our world — and they should be at the center of a student’s education.
Global Context
To prepare students for all that comprises life in the 21st century, we should not only pose core questions, we should also set them in a global context that can incubate even more innovative thinking. Many independent schools are already doing this. For example, Providence Day School (North Carolina), Green Farms Academy (Connecticut), and Fountain Valley School (Colorado) have adopted global education programs that engage students both intellectually and experientially en route to interdisciplinary capstone projects. Using design thinking as a platform, both The Lovett School (Georgia) and Colorado Academy (Colorado) employ global perspectives in conjunction with design thinking to help students prototype solutions to real-world problems. In one exercise, for instance, students concluded that the high school dropout rate would be lower if homework were more experiential or designed by students themselves each night. In another exercise, students surmised that many of the problems of urbanization could be solved if Google’s driverless cars became the norm. The Windward School (California) has gone so far as to establish new programs for what they call Global Scholars and STEAM Scholars in order to create an interdisciplinary culture that fosters innovation and inspires more joy in learning.
Global education provides an ideal way to fuse utility and meaning in our classrooms because it increases our capacity to make dynamic connections when developing curriculum. Whether this happens through innovative course pairings across the STEM–humanities boundary or through unique opportunities for immersion experiences, global education is a platform that opens up the possibilities for teachers to cultivate utility and meaning in their lessons. Reading from a literary canon that includes works from Gilgamesh to Goethe to Garcia Marquez provides students with greater social insights as they examine global scientific and technological developments that affect business and popular culture around the world.
Long ago, the truth-seeking Greek philosopher Diogenes recognized the value of a global perspective when he claimed, “I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitês].” In our times, the importance of interdisciplinary and global curriculum has been validated by thinkers such as Tony Wagner and Howard Gardner and institutions like the National Association of Independent Schools, the Asia Society, the College Board, and even Goldman Sachs. As a part of this groundswell, more and more schools are initiating global education programs to expose students to the idea of global citizenship while more and more U.S. companies are recruiting citizens with cosmopolitan sensibilities.
Restoring the Vitality of Education
Leading schools around the world are developing new curricula and programs to increase both meaning and utility in the education that their students receive. These schools face a serious challenge as they combat the demand for STEM-dominated curricula, but they realize that capitulating to the demand is too great if it constrains the humanity at the heart of our democratic system. What these schools realize is that when students feel that their education is both meaningful and useful, they enjoy learning experiences that can make them happier and more productive citizens.
The recent popularity of TED Talks provides strong evidence as to why the humanities and global education must complement STEM in our schools.7Over the past five years, hundreds of millions of people have watched TED lectures, as Nathan Heller puts it in his New Yorker article, “not so much for the information as for how they make them feel.”8 TED curator Chris Anderson adds, “The heart of the TED idea, I think, is that all of knowledge is connected.”9 This echoes the 1916 exhortation by Alfred North Whitehead that we must aim “to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum.”10
The very nature of independent schools positions them to deliver the kind of education that integrates the humanities and STEM in a global context so that students feel them as complementary parts in their growth. This balance in our schools will help us educate students who are prepared for cosmopolitan citizenship and are able to develop their human potential.
Notes
1. This article’s genesis lies in a 2011 NAIS conference presentation, Global Studies: Critical Thinking, Civic Understanding, and Economic Dynamism. The work of Martha Nussbaum on the democratic value of education, including Cultivating Humanity (1997) and Not for Profit (2010) provided the framework for the presentation.2. Andrew Delbanco. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton University Press. 2012.
3. Martha Nussbaum. Interview with Scott Horton. “Not for Profit: Six Questions for Martha Nussbaum.” June 1, 2010. http://harpers.org/archive/2010/06/hbc-90007141.
4. Cited in Patricia Cohen. In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. February 24, 2009. www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/books/25human.html.
5. Tina Grotzer. Learning the Habits of Mind that Enable Mathematical and Scientific Behavior. Harvard Graduate School of Education. 1996. www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/MathSciMatters/BK2DISPORv03.pdf.
6. Cited in Annie Murphy Paul. Your Brain on Fiction. March 17, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html.
7. TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design.
8. Nathan Heller. “American Chronicles: Listen and Learn.” The New Yorker. July 9, 2012.
9. Quoted in Nathan Heller. “American Chronicles: Listen and Learn.” The New Yorker. July 9, 2012.
10. Alfred North Whitehead. “The Aims of Education.” Presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England. 1916.