Are we really preparing children for the future?
Article reprinted with permission from Bangladesh Press Club Magazine, UAE
Most Bangladeshi families think about careers and professionals, sometimes even before they think of their child’s name. What will my son be when he grows up? What will my daughter be? Although the trend, once upon a time, used to be the need to pursue degrees in engineering or medicine, that shifted drastically towards pursuing commerce or business administration in the last few decades. Particularly in the UAE, a lot of the families either look elsewhere for their children’s higher education, or those who do join universities in the UAE, often pursue business or commerce degrees. Of particular interest are female students who either do not pursue a higher education, drop out or pursue social sciences.
There is a stigma that science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are for “nerds”, “smarties” or “boys” and that they are somehow “uncool”.
Think Stephen Hawking the Physicist, or Sundar Pichai of Google, or Iqbal Qader of Grameen Phone, or Elon Musk of Tesla. They all have one thing in common – besides being famous – they all have a background in STEM.
More and more schools and universities are encouraging students to pursue STEM in their higher education and career. In a world where unemployment and joblessness seems the norm, it is estimated that there will be a million computing job openings but nearly not even half that many graduates trained in those skills to fill those positions!
But it isn’t just about the new jobs.
STEM teaches students skills in logic, critical thinking, analysis. It builds problem solving skills and gears students’ brains to think systematically and find novel solutions.
With automation at a steep increase, tedious, repetitive tasks are becoming more and more obsolete. We already have artificially intelligent bots writing news articles, making basic diagnosis in medicine, driving cars. Future jobs need graduates who can think outside the box. Give a STEM student to code or solve a math problem or sketch an engineering dilemma, they will think systematically, think with what they have at hand and produce a solution that generally will leave others in awe.
At a convention at Oxford University last year, an academician commented grudgingly upon finding my background to be in the sciences “you STEM are taking over the world”. Hmm. May we are, may we aren’t. But I know for sure STEM is a necessity, not an option. One Economics graduate, an alumni I taught once, joined a multinational company as a financial planning officer and is now in the process of having to learn Python. Python is a computer coding language. During a catch-up session with me, she regretted not having pursued a degree in STEM. “Although I am in the finance department, I am literally one of handful people with a background in commerce, whereas everyone else comes from strong STEM backgrounds like statistical engineering, programming and so on”, she said.
STEM teaches students the skills they need to solve real world problems. It allows diversity and prepares students for the future. It is way past time we encouraged children to ask the “why” and “how” and pursue STEM education and careers, don’t you agree?
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