This is a personally interesting debate for me because I enjoy the sciences at school and I'm comfortable with Maths (STEM). However, I enjoy writing and reading creative stories, I enjoy playing music and am good at sketching (Humanities). I've been very focused on STEM in my education because I wish to be an astronaut when I graduate but I've realised this journey is not all about science. If I achieve my goals I need to first get along with my companions in a confined space for a long period of time and I need to explore possibly alien societies and understand any life forms I may meet. All of these aspects of my skills are based on humanities subjects. This job, much like many, combines both STEM and Humanities. Another example is Industrial Design which combines art and engineering skills. My dad’s job requires a deep understanding of emerging technology companies to invest in them but he also needs to negotiate and mentor the company founders to grow and expand their business and teams. When I recently visited Winchester College I learnt about Division (Div) which lies at the heart of their education and provides an opportunity to examine the inter-relationships between different branches of knowledge. 

During COVID, the debate between an emphasis on STEM over Humanities/Arts came to the front of people’s minds, driven by the government encouraging people to retrain to work in the technology industry, implying that non STEM educated people would find it harder to find and keep jobs. In fact, the education secretary of the government in May 2021 went as far as to say that some courses (in Arts/Humanities) would “leave young people with nothing but debt” after studying.

There are many arguments for and against an emphasis on either STEM or Arts/Humanities which I will lay out next. The humanities include the studies of foreign languages, history, philosophy, language, arts, literature, writing, poetry, performing arts theatre, music, dance, and visual arts such as, painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking and more.

• Emphasis on STEM

• The QS World University Rankings by Subject is one of the easiest ways to discover which are the most popular subjects chosen at university and only 4 out of the top 10 are Humanities/Arts and the top 2 (Computer Science and Engineering) are STEM. This clearly shows that in general the youth during university are voting for STEM versus Humanities/Arts which defends the emphasis on these subjects from school and beyond.

• Not doing STEM has become normally seen as a route to unemployment, as seen during the recent example I provided above about the pandemic.

• Economic growth is critical for society and the tech industry  as it is the one that's doing the most to perform this growth and change for the better. For example solving real world problems by improving peoples’ health, improving the world’s food supply, and addressing climate change.

• Technology has become so innate in our lives, for example the use of computers, use of the Internet from research to e-commerce and phone usage, that it naturally has become an interesting subject to learn and teach so we can understand what is around us, how to live with it and improve it.

• Emphasis on Humanities/Art

• A lot of STEM has evolved by building on top of other research which makes the further work increasingly narrower whereas Arts and Humanities tend to be broader. People need to be educated in a number of subjects if we are to be all-rounded and contribute to making society better. For example understanding current affairs can come from history. Also being able to communicate allows humans to get on with each other versus fighting.

• Engineers and scientists are limited by maths or physics or chemical equations and can miss the bigger picture. One example of this is Artificial Intelligence. AI has significantly improved in capabilities in the last few years, it is now more intelligent than artificial. There are many cases where it is difficult to differentiate between computer intelligence versus humans, for example in playing games of Chess, in creating pictures from words and in the latest Chat-GPT solution. Also AI surrounds us in our daily life such as going down to Amazon Fresh with their video recognition technology. However, the questions of what is right and wrong in AI (for example what if a face recognition solution wrongly commits a terrorist) and the understanding of what it means to be intelligent are all Humanities subjects.

I believe this debate is a false dichotomy as it should never be a choice of either/or. Being in balance with both of these areas should be the real answer, as I want to be able to see both sides. Problem solving , even in science, requires creativity.