STEM or Arts?

The pedantic hand-wringing that brought us the hard-sciences curricula known as STEM seems to be one area where those on both sides of the political aisle are in general, philosophical agreement.

In the early 1990s, then-Rep. Roscoe Bartlett became concerned that not enough kids with “normal names” were placing in local science fairs, a rather clumsy attack on Asian success in these competitions. But we knew what he meant.

He meant that we were surrendering the high-paying jobs associated with science, technology, engineering and math to foreigners who, we were told, were spending 23 hours a day in the classroom and developing complex computer programs by the time they were 10.

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