America has a STEM mania.
We want our schools and colleges to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This is where all the funding is. A blue-ribbon commission in Texas even suggested we should charge more tuition for courses in the Humanities, since they don’t lead to jobs and should not be subsidized by taxpayers.
All this in country where:
1. The majority of people do not believe in evolution.
2. A good percentage of people think the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans lived on earth at the same time.
3. The media treats the truth of global warming as a 50/50 deal when 35,000 scientific papers argue for it and less than 30 argue against it.
4. We push “evidence-based education” but not “evidence-based going to war”.
5. People are and sick and dying from fracking, but it is illegal to expose what chemicals are in fracking water and waste.
6. Congress, politicians, and CEOs distain evidence in the name of greed and short-term profit.
7. We use technology and engineering to make drones to kill even our own citizens, but not to solve the problems of oil and global warming.
8. The 2008 recession was caused by experts in economics (like Alan Greenspan) and by politicians, economists, and CEO’s ignoring “moral hazard” (i.e., ignoring ethics, human nature, and simple rationality).
9. A great many people think a single-celled embryo is a living human being.
10. Businesses disdain government regulation but run to government for handouts, subsidies, and protection from market forces
11. We say we believe in free markets and virtually have none amidst monopolies, price fixing, lobbyists, and government subsidies.
12. We allow hospitals to keep data they collect on surgeries from consumers so these consumers cannot make intelligent choices.
13. States continue to slash universities budgets.
14. We use so many poorly regulated toxic chemicals in our environment that Americans have more toxic waste in their blood than other people on earth.
15. We are the fattest people on earth but lard our stores with processed food that barely counts as food in any nutritional sense and is created by “food scientists”.
16. We have the highest inequality in the world when the evidence shows clearly that such a high level of inequality is bad for the economy and for everyone’s health in the society.
17. We have many rich CEOs who want to balance the budget by cutting food stamps for the poor.
18. We have close to the worst health statistics in the developed world, but keep claiming we have the best health system in the world and spend a good deal more on health than do most other developed countries.
19. We keep saying America is the land of social opportunity when social mobilty is now lower in America than in many countries in Europe ("the old country").,
20 We say anyone can make it in Amerca if they work hard enough,then give poor schools to poor children and ensure our children are not in them
21. We treat our teachers and college faculty with disdain.
Some will say “But this is why we need STEM.”
I will say, “No, this is why we do not have it and why we cannot take the push for STEM at face value”.
Imagine what a society would be like that said it liked science, but disdained it in the name of greed, and thought humanities and ethics were a waste of taxpayer money.
You do not have to imagine that society.
You live in it.
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