In the first of what will likely be several pre-election forums, three of the candidates for Eden-Monaro presented their parties’ education platforms at the BCS library on Monday evening.
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With a probable six months before the federal election the policies contained no new information beyond the current situation, however, current member for Eden-Monaro, Dr Mike Kelly, and Liberal and Greens candidates, Dr Fiona Kotvojs and Pat McGinlay respectively, took the opportunity to talk broadly about education to a group of people with specific interests in the issue.
Dr Kotvojs is a smart, articulate woman with a doctorate in education who clearly knows her material. She is a former mathematics teacher and spoke on the need for strength in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects.
It was when Dr Kelly used the “C” word – creative – that the distinction was drawn between the approaches of the two major parties. Dr Kelly spoke about the need for “creative analysis” in education. “I don’t want to see music and art fall by the wayside in the stampede for STEM,” he said.
In the past decade, Australian education has been promoting STEM subjects in schools, particularly to girls. The policy has paid dividends, with women outnumbering men in many university science and technology-based courses.
While STEM subjects provide the skills to deal with the challenges of working in a technologically advanced world, they do not provide the tools for critical thinking. In the “stampede for STEM”, as Dr Kelly put it, the arts and humanities have been sidelined as soft options, or somehow not relevant to the real world.
The opposite is, in fact, the case and education policies would do well to work towards ensuring students receive a balance between STEM and arts-humanities: the latter to provide the critical analysis for the former. This is the true value of humanities and the arts.
A STEM education will teach the skills for employment in a technologically advanced society, but those skills do not meet the needs for assessing, appreciating, qualifying or creating within that society.
Regardless of how technologically advanced our society becomes, there will also always be a need for beauty. Art and music are vital to our progress as highly evolved civilisations. These must not be allowed to languish in favour of coding and calculus.
