Most of the preeminent educational institutions of the world take the contrarian view requiring their students to dedicate a considerable portion of their time to liberal arts courses along with their chosen STEM majors. This was stated by Dr Deborah Fitzgerald, a professor of history of technology at MIT, while speaking to media persons at a press briefing at Habib University.
"In recent years, there has been a great international debate on what kind of college education best prepares students for the world we live in today," she said. The emergence of the digital economy, globalisation, domineering financial institutions, and the ever-presence of computers had created a belief that students should be concentrating on so-called STEM fields - Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine. Indeed, in many countries it was difficult to find alternatives to this kind of education, she added. In her talk, Dr Fitzgerald took the position that the most pressing and complicated problems we face in the world today will not be solved by STEM alone. Entrenched warfare, climate change, poverty, discrimination, clean water, employment and disease are fundamentally human problems, and STEM alone cannot offer lasting solutions for them.
She underlined the importance of a rigorous liberal arts education that can teach students how to deal with these human problems, and become the leaders we need in the days ahead. To make her point, she described how a preeminent institution like MIT has remained committed to the humanities while still maintaining its technical leadership. Dr Fitzgerald acknowledged that many, if not most, educational systems were focused more on providing students vocational skills, not the ability to solve problems in general; on helping students get jobs, not teaching them how to lead their lives. She explained how this leads to problems down the road. During her travels to South Korea (a global leader in technology), she was asked repeatedly to prescribe a reorientation strategy for the country's higher education systems, which felt that though they were "technologically superior" than the US, they could not produce leaders "like Steve Jobs".
Dr Fitzgerald explained that the concern was that South Korea's universities weren't creating enough graduates that could think out of the box - or those who were willing and able to take on the "messy" reality of human existence. These features are hallmarks of students who have been nurtured with a strong liberal arts education, she said.
She explained that MIT's openness to the liberal arts initially came from a desire to produce science and engineering graduates who would be gentlemen, not people "who emulate mechanics". Over time, the need for liberal arts evolved as educationists realised that the really tough problems they needed to prepare graduates for were human/social problems. Explaining this relationship between humanities and science further, she added: "Humanities enable us to understand how human beings will use and abuse the powerful new technologies that are to be introduced in the next few decades."
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