# Does humanity have too much STEM education or too little **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 11, 2010, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576 "2010-01-11T23:40:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/41 "2010-01-14T21:48:51Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > What does this have to do with the lack of job opportunities for people with science and math degrees, which is the main thrust of the OP’s complaint? Well there isn’t a lack of opportunities for people with science and math degrees. So the OP is simply incorrect. But someone mentioned nursing so I made an aside about nursing. Though nursing is a science degree. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/42 "2010-01-14T21:54:01Z")
> [@Mr\_Smashy](#): > > Are there really that many unemployed IT workers, who are not unemployed by choice? I would suggest that it’s regional. A quickie search of CareerBuilder showed 2242 IT positions being advertised within 30 miles of Wash DC, where I live. That’s one jobs website, one location. IT is super-specialized. That’s part of the thing with IT. There are always lots of jobs but they are also always being competed for. The nature of IT is that there is a high turnover rate as IT workers tend to work on contract quite a bit. But yes, there are IT jobs. > [@](#): > > I’m constantly being pinged by recruiters looking to fill positions. I know I’m not the only one… Perhaps STEM needs are also regional? Well, you can’t depend that a job in a highly specialized field won’t require you to move somewhere. > [@](#): > > I know that the unemployment is still a bit high (but not as bad as in some other countries, especially where it’s tougher to fire people). Seems to me, though, that there are still jobs out there. STEM (a new term for me, thanks) only makes sense if it translates into some skill that makes the company money; IT, medical, etc, right? Yes, you have to have a practical discipline. This is often lost on people who are about to graduate college and people who have recently graduated college. They are often very bitter about the fact that their intellectual degree isn’t perfectly applicable to the real job market and that they have to do some basic training beyond the degree they just spent 4-6 or 8 years acquiring. > [@DanBlather](#): > > Oh, of course, public means that we can’t have a good student teacher ratio. It’s the 3rd definition in the dictionary under "public’. I’m sorry if the whole ‘praxis’ level of the reality construct is making it difficult for you to parse your ideological abstractions. I’ll give you a hint: You have to educate the entire populace, the entire population of children need teachers, to have a higher teacher/student ratio you need to devote far more human capital to the job than the public school system devotes. Small class sizes simply isn’t a high priority in public education. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/43 "2010-01-14T21:55:43Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > Has it really? I didn’t have much emphasis on critical thinking in my education - mostly just teachers trying to cram us full of memorization for the state mandated proficiency tests. > > I don’t think your definition of critical thinking is very useful or accurate. Approaching things critically includes the desire to try to evaluate any evidence or arguments in front of you objectively. If you don’t have the relevant facts about the issue at hand, you can try to learn them. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to teach facts in school or anything like that - just that there should be a great emphasis on how to think rather than what to memorize. You seem to be creating a non-existant dichotomy out of what I said. Right, the person prepared with critical thinking skills but is light on facts can learn the facts very quickly as opposed to the person who is heavy on facts but light on critical thinking. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/44 "2010-01-14T22:02:00Z")
Could you please stop going on posting sprees like that? It’s irritating to read, when typically you expect the next post to be made by a different person. Use the little quotation marks button on the bottom right in between the “quote” and quick reply button to quote multiple posts in the one you want to reply to, instead of padding your post count. ---
**Author:** ![Condescending\_Robot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a183cd/32.png) [@Condescending\_Robot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Condescending_Robot)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/45 "2010-01-14T22:15:03Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > Right, the person prepared with critical thinking skills but is light on facts can learn the facts very quickly as opposed to the person who is heavy on facts but light on critical thinking. But I don’t see how you teach “critical thinking skills” of this kind divorced from an environment of using those skills to find, interpret, and make use of facts. Yes, it’s great if you guide students to use and develop their own critical thinking skills to develop a well-founded argument about why the Civil War happened. It’s not great if you emphasize “critical thinking” to the degree that someone doesn’t know what the Fugitive Slave Act, Fort Sumter, and tariffs are after passing an American History class. You can’t critically think about a topic without knowing the facts to think about first; the person who is “light on facts” has already lost the game. Critical thinking as divorced from research and an understanding of how facts relate to arguments is nothing but bickering, and to teach it by itself only produces the type of people who are absolutely confident in their devotion to untrue beliefs, because they can yell loudly or invoke all-purpose defense mechanisms about having a right to their opinion. ---
**Author:** ![DanBlather](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f4b2a3/32.png) [@DanBlather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DanBlather)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/46 "2010-01-14T22:49:56Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > I’m sorry if the whole ‘praxis’ level of the reality construct is making it difficult for you to parse your ideological abstractions. > > I’ll give you a hint: You have to educate the entire populace, the entire population of children need teachers, to have a higher teacher/student ratio you need to devote far more human capital to the job than the public school system devotes. Small class sizes simply isn’t a high priority in public education. So your claim that “public education by definition cannot cater to individuals” means that we currently don’t or won’t devote enough funds, not that there is something about public education that “by definition” _can’t_ have sufficient funding levels. But if it’s just \*won’t \*or \*don’t \*that is by no means a proper use of “by definition”. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/47 "2010-01-14T23:14:59Z")
Re: the public school thing: The problem, in my opinion, is that we have this idea that, for each student to be given individual attention, that means a human teacher has to give it. I think we could pull it off with computers doing the teaching the facts, so that the human teacher can focus more on the more nebulous concepts. Basically, the teacher would be able to focus on teaching you HOW to learn. After you were far enough along, you wouldn’t even really need the teacher, so they could focus on the other students that did still need help. When I was in 5th and 6th grade, we had a “computer lab” where we went and used software to teach us math at our own pace. The program would test our knowledge, and if we didn’t get every question right, it would go into an interactive lesson on the subject, and then would retest. I always thought that was going to be the way of the future. Obviously, this would only work in the more traditional classes. You’d still need people to get together to learn how to interact socially, as most homeschoolers that I have met seem to be behind the curve socially (though they catch up quickly in college or work.) ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2010, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/48 "2010-01-15T00:02:24Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > Right, the person prepared with critical thinking skills but is light on facts can learn the facts very quickly as opposed to the person who is heavy on facts but light on critical thinking. Give a person a Google search, and he has one set of facts today. Teach a person to do a Google search, and he has facts for a lifetime. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2010, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/49 "2010-01-15T00:10:00Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > This…exactly. This is the entire point. But that’s a matter of pre-college level education. But if we do better, we will have more of a pool for the math and science oriented jobs we need. I’m in contact with a lot of professors and a lot of grad students in my section of electrical and computer engineering, and only a tiny fraction are US born. I work at a well known high tech company. A bunch of us just changed buildings, and are more or less isolated. Of about 20 people at all levels of education, 2 are US born. This is not anti-immigration in the least, but I think it would be nice to get some of the best US born people into my profession, which does pay pretty well. > [@](#): > > Well, the problem there is that people are still producing textbooks. You don’t need textbooks anymore and they should be done away with. To be replaced by? Textbooks, for science at least, started being written when papers became too specialized for the average student to read. Where this is not true, for instance in many lit classes and even some philosophy classes, you don’t read textbooks, you read original source material. We might change the delivery mechanism, but we will still have textbooks. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2010, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/50 "2010-01-15T00:26:04Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Give a person a Google search, and he has one set of facts today. Teach a person to do a Google search, and he has facts for a lifetime. That’s part of the equation. But you can have all the information in the world at your fingertips and still be an idiot. This brings up the image of Jenny McCarthy who proudly proclaimed that she graduated from the university of google as a defense against accusations of… well, that she has no clue what she’s talking about in regards to anti-vax BS. People aren’t that good at evaluating the quality of sources, how to seperate the good from the bad, and what conclusions to draw from that information. Increasingly we will have any information available to us at any time - but how many people can use it well? ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/51 "2010-01-16T16:15:22Z")
> [@shiftless](#): > > I’ve heard that refrain about how we need more math and science people for over 40 years and yet I’ve never seen any industry actually willing to pay for those skills. I suspect that engineers make a decent starting salary but when I graduated with a degree in math the only advice I ever got was “see if you can become an actuary.” The truth is that businesses like those base skills, critical thinking and such, but they don’t want to pay for them. Businesses like people who can perform specific tasks for them. They hire people to do a particular job. And honestly unless you are going to do something like design arcane trading or economics models, there isn’t really a lot of “math” in business beyond some basic addition and subtraction. Really, with the internet, it seems to me that there is no excuse for going to school, studying a major that no one is hiring for and then complaining about not being able to find a job after the fact. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/52 "2010-01-16T16:16:21Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > Could you please stop going on posting sprees like that? It’s irritating to read, when typically you expect the next post to be made by a different person. Use the little quotation marks button on the bottom right in between the “quote” and quick reply button to quote multiple posts in the one you want to reply to, instead of padding your post count. I do that when I realize I am going to reply to more than one post before I do it. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/53 "2010-01-16T16:29:11Z")
> [@Condescending\_Robot](#): > > But I don’t see how you teach “critical thinking skills” of this kind divorced from an environment of using those skills to find, interpret, and make use of facts. Yes, it’s great if you guide students to use and develop their own critical thinking skills to develop a well-founded argument about why the Civil War happened. It’s not great if you emphasize “critical thinking” to the degree that someone doesn’t know what the Fugitive Slave Act, Fort Sumter, and tariffs are after passing an American History class. You can’t critically think about a topic without knowing the facts to think about first; the person who is “light on facts” has already lost the game. Critical thinking as divorced from research and an understanding of how facts relate to arguments is nothing but bickering, and to teach it by itself only produces the type of people who are absolutely confident in their devotion to untrue beliefs, because they can yell loudly or invoke all-purpose defense mechanisms about having a right to their opinion. But what you are essentially describing is someone who doesn’t have critical thinking skills. If they lack the ability to parse those facts then they don’t have the critical thinking skills. Basically you can make critical thinking skills primary and the absorption of facts will come naturally. You can make facts primary and hte critical thinking does not come naturally. For instance, if I teach you about the runaway slave act, and I teach you not just that this was a law that was passed, but explain the mentality of the people making laws such as the runaway slave act, then you require the person to think about it. You then challenge any uncritical assumptions that they come to. By engaging their critical faculties you get them to think about the facts themselves. They have to look into the facts in order to support their argument, and as such they memorize it automatically. As opposed to rote memorization which doesn’t engage the critical faculties at all. > [@DanBlather](#): > > So your claim that “public education by definition cannot cater to individuals” means that we currently don’t or won’t devote enough funds, not that there is something about public education that “by definition” _can’t_ have sufficient funding levels. But if it’s just \*won’t \*or \*don’t \*that is by no means a proper use of “by definition”. Sure. > [@Voyager](#): > > Give a person a Google search, and he has one set of facts today. Teach a person to do a Google search, and he has facts for a lifetime. Exactly. A big part of critical thinking skills is the ability to do quality research. > [@Voyager](#): > > But if we do better, we will have more of a pool for the math and science oriented jobs we need. I’m in contact with a lot of professors and a lot of grad students in my section of electrical and computer engineering, and only a tiny fraction are US born. I work at a well known high tech company. A bunch of us just changed buildings, and are more or less isolated. Of about 20 people at all levels of education, 2 are US born. This is not anti-immigration in the least, but I think it would be nice to get some of the best US born people into my profession, which does pay pretty well. Yes. That is true, but your demographic is skewed. Math and Science skills need more emphasis, no doubt about it, but the East Asian cultures that are pumping out Engineers these days tend to over-emphasize them. But I think we are in agreement that if primary education did better with Math and Science education, then it would be better for the populace as a whole. It would make us more competitive for the jobs you are talking about, and it would also give the general populace a better educational baseline with which to support those technical jobs. > [@](#): > > To be replaced by? Textbooks, for science at least, started being written when papers became too specialized for the average student to read. Where this is not true, for instance in many lit classes and even some philosophy classes, you don’t read textbooks, you read original source material. We might change the delivery mechanism, but we will still have textbooks. I didn’t say we shouldn’t produce texts that distill the information for the students. I said we shouldn’t produce TEXTBOOKS. There is plenty of public information available on the internet to teach anatomy for instance. All without resorting to scientific journals. Teaching anatomy is one of those places where wikipedia is the right tool for the job. Understanding the range of motion for the [Flexor Carpi Ulnaris](http://www.illpumpyouup.com/articles/images/forearm.gif) does not require an expensive textbook. It’s not the distilled information I object to. It is the limited textual format required by paper size and page counts that limits how much information can go into the book, and the sheer weight of the books, that I have a problem with. Simply put expecting a 13 year old to carry around 30 lbs of books on their back is kind of unfair, and at this point we have the technology where they shouldn’t have to. If McGraw-Hill wanted to publish their information in a web format and license the product to schools, that would be fine. No more fines for writing in the margins. Every student could have a notepad account where they can scrawl all over the website if they like. It would be considerably cheaper, as you could charge less expensive licenses for the accounts, and provide paired down laptops that have security software so that students cannot browse beyond sanctioned materials on that laptop. ---
**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/54 "2010-01-16T16:29:43Z")
[Dehumanized](http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/09/0082640), an in-depth article by _Harper’s_ Mark Slouka, suggests that society _wants_ to keep turning out math and science grads regardless of whether the economy _needs_ more of them. One reason - of course - is that the private sector is deeply prejudiced in favor of people who deal in quantifiable data. This has shaped our institutions - educational and public ones too - in ways that are not easily adaptable to changing needs. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/55 "2010-01-16T16:34:34Z")
> [@Beware\_of\_Doug](#): > > [Dehumanized](http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/09/0082640), an in-depth article by _Harper’s_ Mark Slouka, suggests that society _wants_ to keep turning out math and science grads regardless of whether the economy _needs_ more of them. > > One reason - of course - is that the private sector is deeply prejudiced in favor of people who deal in quantifiable data. This has shaped our institutions - educational and public ones too - in ways that are not easily adaptable to changing needs. Doesn’t seem to be too much support for that one. The reality is as **Voyager** and others have pointed out, that people are coming to America to take technical jobs with their math and science educations. So clearly there IS a need for people with these skills. If a math and science grad failed to prepare themselves for the exigencies of a real marketplace, that’s hardly a strike against math and science in general. But as I said before, we could do much better in terms of math and science in High School. I am quite good at math actually, always have been. Didn’t do well in higher maths because the way the teacher taught it just pushed me away. It just didn’t work. I didn’t get it because the rote memorization didn’t work for me. I need to understand it, to grok its purpose to understand it. But I can actually do complex calculations in my head. Got all the way through Algebra 1 that way. ---
**Author:** ![Animastryfe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8797f3/32.png) [@Animastryfe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Animastryfe)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/56 "2010-01-16T17:26:16Z")
> [@Dr.Love](#): > > I have to agree with **ITR champion**. When I got my B.S. (only two years ago) the engineering majors had some of the highest starting salaries of all graduates. In particular, I recall that chemical engineering usually topped the list, and mechanical engineering wasn’t far behind. Despite what **Shalmanese** says, the only engineering major that didn’t have a good starting salary was the one most entwined with public financing, civil engineering. Here’s a [list](http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp) of starting and median salaries of specific majors. Edit: Oops, someone already posted something similar. ---
**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/57 "2010-01-16T17:51:38Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > Doesn’t seem to be too much support for that one. The reality is as **Voyager** and others have pointed out, that people are coming to America to take technical jobs with their math and science educations. So clearly there IS a need for people with these skills. If a math and science grad failed to prepare themselves for the exigencies of a real marketplace, that’s hardly a strike against math and science in general. > > But as I said before, we could do much better in terms of math and science in High School. I am quite good at math actually, always have been. Didn’t do well in higher maths because the way the teacher taught it just pushed me away. It just didn’t work. I didn’t get it because the rote memorization didn’t work for me. I need to understand it, to grok its purpose to understand it. But I can actually do complex calculations in my head. Got all the way through Algebra 1 that way. I might counter that the way the subjects are taught is just as important to society - and reflects the kind of minds society wants (if not needs). You focus on outcomes and results and what do you get? Rote memorizers, i-dotters and t-crossers, and good organization men. Thinking outside the box, thinking critically, and solving problems in new ways are great buzzwords for organizations. But the reality is not nearly so marketable. Status quo thinking is what keeps the lights on. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/58 "2010-01-16T18:02:53Z")
> [@Beware\_of\_Doug](#): > > I might counter that the way the subjects are taught is just as important to society - and reflects the kind of minds society wants (if not needs). You focus on outcomes and results and what do you get? Rote memorizers, i-dotters and t-crossers, and good organization men. Organization is a critical thinking skill. I disagree that our system produces good organizers. Most people cannot read a spreadsheet (Math skill) organize a taxonomy (math skill) or read statistics (math skill). > [@](#): > > Thinking outside the box, thinking critically, and solving problems in new ways are great buzzwords for organizations. But the reality is not nearly so marketable. Status quo thinking is what keeps the lights on. What is marketable for a corporation and what is useful cognitively are two separate issues. ---
**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/59 "2010-01-16T19:24:53Z")
You betcha. But what we get is what we’re willing to pay for - not necessarily what we need. BTW, [organization men](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/02/17/the-training-of-the-organization-man/) have to do with organization_s_ - large corporatist entities - not necessarily with being organized. But there I go invoking soft science again. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2010, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576/60 "2010-01-16T19:29:43Z")
> [@Beware\_of\_Doug](#): > > You betcha. But what we get is what we’re willing to pay for - not necessarily what we need. > > BTW, [organization men](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/02/17/the-training-of-the-organization-man/) have to do with organization_s_ - large corporatist entities - not necessarily with being organized. But there I go invoking soft science again. Fair point. So are you arguing that being an organization man is hindered by good critical thinking skills? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-humanity-have-too-much-stem-education-or-too-little/524576.md?page=4)