Dear President Trump & Secretary DeVos, Raise A LAMP

President Donald Trump & Education Sec.Betsy Devos
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Forbes)

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author:  One of the latest shibboleths in education policy is called STEM. That’s an acronym for the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. This, of course, is very well intended. As reported by Politico, the president himself, in late September,

... directed at least $200 million a year to technology education grants for women and minorities.

The president signed a memo instructing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to prioritize STEM through existing competitive grant programs that will encourage women and minorities to participate in coding and other computer-based careers — though senior administration officials offered few specifics on how they would fulfill that goal.

"We need to create pathways for all our citizens to get jobs," Trump said at an Oval Office signing ceremony, surrounded by children. "When you get out of school, you're gonna get great jobs."I get what’s behind this. Writers of software code make good money. Per devcodehack, if you have 4+ years of experience and work in a major tech hub like the San Francisco Bay Area or NYC, you average about $100,000 a year. “Some programmers are even granted stock options or stock units in the company they work for. The first engineering hire for a startup can get up to 5% of the company, and if the startup does well that can turn into millions.” Writing code for Facebook or Google can pay considerably more than, say, teaching elementary school in San Francisco.

Trump hereby is steering some resources toward women and minorities that would guarantee, if they’ve got the chops, a pretty comfortable middle class living. (After tax and with the high cost structure, $100,000 doesn’t go as far as it looks in the Hubs where you can command it.  Still, respectable.)

This is a good thing. One cheer for that!

One? Why not three?

I’m an old school liberal arts major. I received my BA in English with a double major in Religion. With a drift toward the deification of science, something in me has always grieved at the marginalization of the liberal arts. Admittedly, I am prejudiced.

But it also turns out that I am unfashionable yet not quite alone. My constrained enthusiasm might have a legitimate basis.

Susan Etlinger gave a 2016 TED talk, recently reprised on NPR on the TED Radio Hour, How Do We Approach Big Data With A Critical Eye? Etlinger is “an industry analyst with Altimeter Group and a board member of the Big Boulder Initiative, an industry organization dedicated to promoting the successful and ethical use of social data.” She offered many arresting observations, from trenchantly contrasting Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s dueling dystopias and the importance of context in interpreting data, to differences between correlation and causation as well as different ways of addressing autism.

Her show-stopping moment comes at 8’25”:

The challenge is, that, we have this opportunity to make meaning out of it ourselves. Because frankly, data doesn’t create meaning. We do. So, as business people, as consumers, as patients, as citizens, we have a responsibility, I think, to spend more time focusing on our critical thinking skills. Why?  Because at this point in our history, as we’ve heard, many times over, we can process exabytes [a quintillion bytes] of data at lightning speed and we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past.  Great, Right? And so what we need to do instead is spend a little bit more time on things like the humanities and sociology and the social sciences, rhetoric, philosophy, ethics because they give us context that is so important for Big Data and because they help us become better critical thinkers.I recently encountered some of the comparable if more acerbic thoughts of David Rose on this topic. Rose is an author, unlicensed polymath, and, among other things, a virtuoso mycologist. He is a contributing editor of FUNGI. Rose is composing a lexicon, now approaching 1,000 entries, and he has kindly shared his section on STEM, here presented with his permission:STEM, n. Acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, an educational program that has evolved into a monstrous hegemonic conspiracy to abolish the humanities and arts for the single purpose of increasing competitiveness in technology development. STEM is positioned as an alarmist warning and a patriotic indoctrination, marketed in diametrical opposition to education in history, languages, and music; it is ahistorical and anti-historical, focused on the abstract language of cognitive finance, mathematics, and the trade school model of manufacturing tractable posthuman workers with single skills. STEM recruitment centers include all major American colleges and universities, the Boy Scouts, and the Department of Defense. See LAMP.

LAMP, n. Acronym for Language, Art, Music, and Philosophy: the quadrivium of education and foundation of educational reform in the Post-Digital Age. Ultimately derived from the four virtues in Greek philosophy (temperance, justice, prudence, and fortitude) and modeled after the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) of Medieval scholarship, education grounded in these fields benefits honest scholars and bewildered STEM educators by imparting at least one essential skill: to speak and write a clear English sentence. LAMP education follows the moral imperative of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite in educational justice to countermand the depredations of Common Core, the test-and-punish folly of the No Child Left Behind Act, and the monomaniacal obsession with so-called STEM education, also known as Newton's Sleep.The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, celebrating the Statue of Liberty, concludes, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Note: lamp. Not stem.

Let me therefore generously suggest that President Trump invite Mr. Rose to the oval office, or Mara-A-Lago, for a long, penetrating, philosophical exploration of the dangers inherent in Newtons Sleep and how these dangers can be averted through LAMP.

Could be historic!

And let me suggest that Secretary DeVos summon Ms. Etlinger to her offices at the US Department of Education to discuss how it is that we “have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past” and how best the Secretary can foster “more time on things like the humanities and sociology and the social sciences, rhetoric, philosophy, ethics because they give us context that is so important for Big Data and because they help us become better critical thinkers.”
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Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

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