The Fight Between Liberal Arts and STEM Majors
/The following post was created as part of the assigned work for Henry Jenkins's PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals. The goal of the class is to help communication and media studies students to develop the skills and conceptual framework necessary to do more public-facing work. They learn how to write op-eds, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and dialogic writing and consider examples of contemporary and historic public intellectuals from around the world. The definition of public intellectuals goes beyond a celebrity-focus approach to think about all of the work which gets done to engage publics -- at all scales -- with scholarship and critiques concerning the media, politics, and everyday life. Our assumption is that most scholars and many nonscholars do work which informs the public sphere, whether it is speaking on national television or to a local PTA meeting.
"Your liberal arts student is useless to the country's development. Otherwise, why wouldn't the Americans limit the entry of liberal arts students into their universities?" a drunk elder, of a significantly higher social class than our family, said at our Saturday night family dinner. He developed his argument further by telling a kid from my family who had just started high school, "Your brother can't change because he is too old to study STEM, but you still have the chance to choose. You can study liberal arts on the side, but you should never waste your opportunity for education by not studying a STEM major." He explicitly expressed his negative attitude toward the student who studies liberal arts, similarly his approbation for the student who studies STEM.
Disregarding how nonsensical his argument can be, this conflict between liberal arts and STEM majors has been debated in China for the past few decades. I was personally irritated by his statement, not because I am part of the liberal arts student community, but by how extreme and uneducated he, someone who has a high social class and potential power in Chinese society, is in this area. The legitimacy and objectivity of the drunk elder’s statement aside, his speech and statement reflected a traditional STEM-major first education culture within China, even in the broader Asian context: STEM majors are “better” than liberal art majors.
FIGURE 1
To understand the statement, we need to read the history of the development of China’s education system and its original purpose. China’s education system was modeled after the Soviet Union, focusing on the development of industrialization. Despite the later transformation to a more China-unique system, its core and the STEM vs. liberal arts divide have not been replaced. The traditional STEM courses, which are science and computer science-related majors in the United States context, have been highly appreciated by the government. This appreciation continued to develop with the invasion of Japan, the war in Vietnam, and an eye towards boosting the country’s development. As a matter of fact, without the development of scientific study, China wouldn’t even have had the chance to be the world factory that it is. Within this period of time, China’s focus on liberal arts studies has significantly decreased.
This situation is quite different from the role that liberal arts studies played in China’s historical development. When we trace back to the earliest intellectuals, like Confucian theory, the hundreds of intellectual thinking genres in the Spring and Autumn War Period, how liberal arts intellectuals Sun Zhong Shan and Lu Xun helped form the current structure of the People’s Republic of China, these histories clearly demonstrate how liberal arts public intellectuals helped create China as a country. This makes it even more ironic that studying liberal arts has been despised and disdained by most people in China from the beginning of the industrial development period. It wasn’t until recent decades that the government started to bring liberal arts majors back to the public’s attention, but they are still incomparable to STEM majors. The argument that this article is trying to state is not that the STEM major is not worthy of being valued but that both majors should be given similar weight.
Figure 2: English Translation “Scientists and engineers all over the country strive to learn new skills and transform nature to develop the driving force of industry”
Thus, it can easily be concluded that the previous education system and its culture of preference for STEM majors are products of the country’s goals in the ongoing competition of economic development and desire to push the limits of technological knowledge. Since China belongs to a state-orientated economic market, STEM major-related jobs and academic professionals gained massive financial support from all directions. As the government promotes field development and promises more benefits for related jobs, it inspires an enormous number of citizens to take that field as a goal for personal development. Some of the common dialogue statements include:
“You study liberal arts because you can’t do well in STEM.”
“What kind of jobs will you be able to get by studying liberal arts?”
“How do you make a living by studying literature or sociology?”
What’s more is that during family dinners on the occasion of festival celebrations, people who study liberal arts are questioned constantly about their choices since their families do not believe that their studies will help him/her to make a living in this society. The most common impression that people have about those who study liberal arts is of people who can only talk but can barely act or make progress for society. Then, we can take those perspectives to understand that the determination criteria of “better” for Chinese culture is more about job-seeking and profit-making. But let's think critically about this question. For a country and its society to continue development, will studying in a singular, narrow manner truly be sufficient?
Before talking about how narrowing majors can be troublesome for personal and social development, we need to know how China’s education system is structured. It is very different from the United States. In high school, students will not be able to select STEM major-related courses but stick to more traditional courses, including Chinese, Math, English, Chemistry, Physical, Biology, Politics, History, and Geography. Then the students are separated into liberal arts and STEM/science majors to select some courses to test on Gaokao. (There are many different majors in China, like law school and medical school, etc; we are mainly talking about the situation as it relates to liberal arts majors and STEM majors.) Then in the Chinese college education system, the course of study for a STEM major means that you will spend most of your time studying major-related courses. STEM courses will include computer science, electrical engineering, data science, etc. Liberal arts courses will include sociology, psychology, literature, etc. There are not many choices to continue to expand and select courses from other majors unless students spend their spare time reading and studying by themselves. In the meantime, many students do not learn what most of their major courses will be until they enter college, which can be painful and late for many students to decide their path. Take STEM courses as an example; in the United States, some argue STEM courses are offered too late since they require students to cultivate interest at an early age. Moreover, STEM courses have always focused on the winner-take-all belief, which means they are naturally aligned with elitist culture: the “winner,” who has accomplished great work in the field, is praised by the whole community about everything that they do. This is in conflict with Chinese communist culture. The existence of elitist culture in the Chinese social context raises tremendous challenges and unexpected issues for a student’s personal development. Those students focused mainly on STEM courses are forced to disregard the study of literature and how to build up personal connections; ironically, they don’t even have time to learn how to talk to girls.
figure 3
What are some examples of the consequences for students who fall into a culture that prefers STEM major study and disregards liberal arts? The primary function of the study of liberal arts is to define and understand social or human values in this changing world. Without them, students will lack understanding of human networks, leaving them with a rather superficial cognitive depth for things that we encounter daily and an inability to control advanced technology in these areas, like ChatGPT.
Values are the fundamental concepts that keep the world functioning. Money, Country, Weapon, Life, Death, Culture, and Relationships are all part of values. The transformation of a country from a traditional imperial political structure to the current democracy or communist structure is all a product of the values-thinking process. Values also determine how people act and behave, what people should and should not do. Laws, morals, and ethics all result from the value-thinking process. What the liberal arts mainly study is societal and human values. Internet violence is a classic example of how people take advantage of the functions of technology but cannot think more critically and reflect on the consequences of their behavior. Without liberal arts study, there will be no ethical and moral thinking, reflections on law and order, or educational and philosophical thinking. Students cannot adapt and analyze the constant changes in human society, and they likely won’t have these skills after entering the workforce where they may have a more detrimental impact on society.
Consider ChatGPT. The function of this latest AI technology can easily replace most human’s repetitive and calculative work. For example, ChatGPT can easily draft news articles, conduct brief market research, and write a high school or even a college essay. Figure 4 shows a response that ChatGPT generated for the topic, “Should colleges cancel liberal arts courses?”
figure 4
As the response shows, the AI has the ability to gather a massive amount of information and to conduct a rather critical thinking analysis, which would outcompete many lower-level job positions. What’s more, GitHub has developed an AI program that can automatically debug code if the program is built with the code stored in their dataset. These technologies have become advanced enough that the market will not need low-level computer science employees in the future. Such AI technologies can potentially be applied to all STEM fields, which means that the requirements for future STEM employees will be much higher than they are today, and the potential study duration may continue to expand. As the creator of ChatGPT, Sam Altman, mentioned during an interview, the future generation may be separated into two groups: those who are AI above and those who are AI below. Being AI above will require the employee to outcompete AI levels of analysis and information gathering. It is undoubtable that in the future, the education system will require students to become AI above.
For students to be competitive with future AI technologies, students should study more multi-disciplinary knowledge to increase their creativity and critical thinking ability. Such students will have the cognitive depth to understand things not only through a singular perspective but though diverse and holistic ones. In the meantime, it is also essential for students to have the ability to handle those technologies properly, without using them as cheating tools. With the help of AI, technologies will likely continue to evolve at a fast rate, which will create this gap between most people’s adaptability and moral code of conduct. Without further pushing people to study more about ethics, morals, law, social, and personal values, society may become a real doomsday cyberpunk game or tv show.
figure 5
Finally, the argument that I am trying to make in this blog entry is to suggest that the combination and equal valuation of liberal arts majors and STEM majors will be necessary for the education system to evolve in the future. The rapid and consistent change in society's values, technological development, and the consequences of international relationships that impact individuals will all require students to equip themselves with the skills that are taught in both liberal arts and STEM majors.
Biography
Botao Xu is a second-year master’s student in USC global communication media program, who has been studying in US as an international student for more than 10 years. My primary focus now is the study of interplay between communication, culture, and capitalism and media representation. They are the person who is too American for the Chinese and too Chinese for the American.
