A SHTEAM We Could Have?

Nothing ages you quite like learning how people are talking these days. 

I had been familiar with the acronym STEM- for science, technology, engineering, and math, because I heard it from resentful humanists whingeing about the instrumentalization of education.

Study one of these four, and you could work for Goldman or Google. If not, the 21st century doesn't have a place for you.

Sound familiar? It's an old saw.

Recently, though, I learned that "arts" has been added to the acronym. Because design and focus on user-experience and user-interface often calls for creative thinking, educators and others are now talking about "STEAM".

This isn't something that happened last week, of course. It turns out my partner, a children's librarian, is very familiar with the trend in the field and has been since grad school. Such a good listener I am.

I couldn't help thinking if we softy types could get in on the action- why not have "SHTEAM", adding the humanities to the mix? Mostly, I just like the name, as much as it sounds like someone took it from Yiddish.

Couldn't the philistines on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley benefit from a few choice quotes from Hafiz in their speeches to investors? Skilled wordsmiths could surely come up with better names for iOS apps than just common nouns with random vowels taken out. The possibilities are endless.

I kid. But in all seriousness, I don't have a ready answer for how non-STEM education will thrive institutionally when budgets always seem to be tightening, even at the richest universities, and any learning that is not presented as immediately remunerative is suspect, setting aside that our dear leaders and titans of industry are seldom technocrats, and are quite often scientifically illiterate.

We are going to have to come up with something that persuasively says just why it's worthwhile to spend time thinking about the thinking in poetry, religious doctrine, and ethnography. And it will need to seem worthwhile to people who don't already think like us.

Short of that, we'll need to go for shtick in the meantime.