Personal blog: All opinions are only my own, unless you want to borrow them. (he/him)
Octavia Butler is one of my most treasured authors. Her work is astounding. More than anyone in the past few decades, she took up the mantle of the literary scifi authors of the 1960s and ’70s—Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, et al.
Like them, Butler’s work transcends boundaries and achieves a level of artistry and power that’s rare. She’s an irreducibly important author. Her legacy is one to be treasured and honored.
Rebecca Vnuk interviewed me for the June issue of Booklist Online’s Corner Shelf. I talk about digital literacy, social media, online readers’ advisory, and try to describe what I do for a living.
I keep thinking about my latest posts on education and the need I see for a three-legged balance between STEM, liberal arts, and vocational training. It occurs to me that this is incomplete. There needs to be a fourth leg:
Arts education.
Music, visual arts, performing arts—these are different from liberal arts (philosophy, history, literature study, rhetoric, etc.), just as liberal arts are different from STEM. But just like liberal arts and STEM, arts education also seeks to develop critical thinking skills, along its own lines and according to its own standards.
When I critiqued the STEAM concept, I did so in terms of liberal arts but that’s incorrect. The “A” in STEAM stands for “Arts”—as in arts education, not liberal.
I think my critique still stands: integrating arts education with STEM is a mistake. I believe that conflating them makes it virtually impossible to avoid subordinating the arts aspect to the STEM aspect. They’re both best served when they’re allowed to stand on their own.
A four-legged educational system: STEM—Liberal arts—Arts—Vocational training.
That should be our goal.
A couple of people responded to my previous post about education and the need for three pillars: liberal arts + STEM + vocational training. They point out that a movement exists to expand STEM to STEAM—to integrate arts education into STEM education.
I disagree with this idea. I’m convinced that liberal arts and STEM education need to be allowed to flourish each on their own and to interact with each other as equals. I feel that STEAM initiatives intrinsically subordinate the arts aspect to the larger STEM aspect.
But my concern about STEAM speaks to something deeper. At their cores, both liberal arts and STEM educations seek to teach strong critical thinking skills. They use very different methodologies to do so, and are based on different structures of reasoning, logic, discourse, etc.
I know many people for whom STEM education doesn’t work. Their minds simply don’t respond to that teaching methodology, to those structures of knowledge. Likewise, I know many people for whom liberal arts education doesn’t work and for the same reasons.
If the goal is to promote critical thinking skills, it’s obvious to me that we need to maintain multiple avenues for people to get there.
Intentionally conflating different educational methodologies and pathways is a mistake. Cramming them together narrows the options available for people to learn the critical thinking skills they need in ways that are best suited to them.
I believe that this can only reduce the efficacy of education overall.
Please read this article. He makes an important point. The headline, as always, is composed to be divisive—his argument is more nuanced than the headline lets on.
Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous by Fareed Zakaria (posted by The Washington Post on March 26, 2015)
Let me start with this: STEM education is important. Despite the headline, this article doesn’t try to argue that it isn’t important.
Looking back at the history of education in this country, it seems to me that we were at our best, our strongest and most successful, when we had a balance across three arenas of study: liberal arts + STEM + vocational training. We need all three, equally. Liberal arts, in particular, is what stood us apart from much of the rest of the world during the 20th century. We also had far-and-away the most robust and most affordable vocational training in the world during the middle section of the century.
Liberal arts tracks have been under attack for pretty much my entire life, and prior. Vocational training in this country has been utterly gutted over the past decades. STEM education is important but I also worry that we emphasize it at the expense of reestablishing this three-pillared balance.
Continue reading “Public Libraries: STEM, Maker Spaces & the State of Modern Education”
The passing of Sir Terry Pratchett hurts.
It’s not normal for me to get caught up in the passing of a celebrity. I might take part in conversations about issues surrounding them (as I did with Robin Williams and depression) but Sir Terry is different. His death hits me personally.
Reading his work left you with the sense that you now had a personal connection with him. His words were so open and forthright, you felt that he was sharing his soul with you in a way that is rare. His characters found homes inside each of us, they became a part of us, on a level more intimate than any other author I know of.
To everyone who read and treasured his work, he wasn’t just a favorite author—he felt like a friend.
None of what I’ve written here is sufficient to express how important his novels are to me. As author Ellie Di Julio puts it:
Sir Terry taught me about being human.
I’m glad that he has been freed from his suffering. But I’ll truly miss his words. The world has lost a great man and wondrous soul.
The best way to honor this great man is to donate to The Research Institute for the Care of Older People.
I recently reviewed Cory Doctorow’s book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free. Copyright is a passion of mine and I think this is a good opportunity to summarize my position on the matter.
For me, the single most important aspect of copyright is the public domain.
Most of the major copyright reforms over the past half century have made it a priority to prevent creative works from entering the public domain for as long as possible. On the other hand, there are many creative workers and educators of all stripes who depend on public domain materials to do their jobs—people who can’t afford to pay for usage rights to copyrighted stuff. This is one of the central conflicts of our copyright system.
When I was first taught about copyright, I was told that there were two equally important purposes that it was designed to serve:
My friend Bil liked my 2014: My Year in Reading post so much, he made an infographic of it:
He asked me to name an animal and I chose the three-toed tree sloth.
Bil is an amazing writer / artist / father / husband / shark lover / bland car enthusiast / SEO guru. Please read his blog. Also, if you want any fancy-schmancy infographics, drop him a line.
[AUTHOR’S NOTE added December 27, 2019: I was going through my old tracking spreadsheets and discovered an error in my original post. I had listed my longest stretch without reading as 28 days from August 11-September 8. I miscalculated this information. My longest stretch without reading in 2014 was actually 35 days from April 4-May 8. I can’t update this infographic, though.]
I have a friend who posts a list of all the books they read each year on their Facebook page. This has inspired me to write my own Year in Reading posts.
All of the reading data that follows comes from my Goodreads account. A complete list of all the books I read last year is at the bottom of this post.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I realized after I posted this on February 12, 2015, that I had miscalculated some of my figures based on the data. On February 13, I recalculated all my figures to correct for my previous mistake. This post has been updated to reflect these new calculations. I added a day to my time-to-read figures.
I read 40 books in 2014. It was a nonfiction-heavy year for me.
Wishing everyone the very best in 2015!
John the Librarian 