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Definitions of STEM and a presentation of its pedagogy will come shortly. But it is both very German, and very helpful to defining this project and reaching its goals, to ask first not what is STEM, but rather why STEM? Why not something else as the focus of an earnest (and even desperate) attempt to help language learning, and particularly German, survive - it is either too late or too early to speak of "thrive" - in American education? (Rilke: Wer spricht von Leben••)? And why STEM and not some other acronym or grouping of subject areas?

Here someone old enough to have taken German in an American high school in the early 1960s will have a sense of semi-déjà vu. The nation is alarmed that its young cannot understand math and science - yes, been there, done that, schon mal da gewesen. But now the mix includes Technology and Engineering, as though those two were not in existence in 1960.

That same oldster, born perhaps in 1948, would also remember that the ediucational panic of the 1960s did include languages, with one language - Russian - getting much of the attention, though other languages were allowed along for the ride: German, of course, as the language of science, and French, of course, as the language of reason and culture, and maybe even Spanish as an exotic outlier (with Latin perhaps comfortably commenting from the wings, still secure in its status and enrollment). the boutique languages of today, like Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic, were not part of the 1960s discussion, nor was Spanish ••reasons. Among other non-issues of the 1960s educational panic: critical thinking, career pathways, and, at least in the early 1960s, diversity and feminism. There was some concern about reading and writing.

The 1960s version of STEM might be reduced, only somewhat simplistically, to this: the "hardest" sciences (hardest to learn? hardest in the sense of not being "squishy", like biology?), for the particular purposes of nuclear physics and engineering, aeronautics and astronautics; careers in industries or government bodies related to defense or to demonstrating national superiority through science and technology; ••languages

Notable by their absence, at least in mass consciousness, were several of today's prominent STEM areas: environmentalism and medicine and •• among the subject areas; diversity and career familiarization among the social goals; and alarm about critical thinking, literacy and basic numeracy. ••COmputers, internet.

Why those contours, and not those of today's STEM campaign? Because today there is no Cold War, no dread about imminent mass destruction in a global thermonuclear war, no worry that American technology and heavy industry were inferior, no pervasive consiousness of a technology-generated Information Age - but also a belief that the frightening gaps in the nation's defense (and offense) could be fixed by better education of an elite through energetic rethinking of pedagogy in just a few subject areas, primarily physics and chemistry. Because major parts of the "S" in today's STEM were not regarded as needing radical revision: the biological sciences had not yet been shaken up by an environmentalism that was not solely Romantic, but rather also derived from alarm at pollution, climate change, and the finiteness of natural resources; until the late 1960s "DNA" was not part of the vocabulary of those graduating from even the highly selective colleges. Because today there is a greater concern about equity and equality, legal mandates to include women and minorities, much anxiety about literacy, numeracy, and employability, and a nagging fear that even the elite students are grievously deficient not only in the STEM subject but also critical thinking, communication, and even the everday practical knowledge and skills that were - with considerably justification - taken for granted half a century ago, when girls could handle an electric sewing machine and boys tinkered with their hotrods, model airplanes, and ham radio set, it was still possible to believe that "American Know-how" and "Yankee Ingenuity" ••and ••grit were not rare -and certainly not concentrated among recent immigrants, let alone recent Asian immigrants. Yes, at the fringes there were grumps asking or telling us "WhyJohnny Can't Read" (or write or figure), but they tended to be backward-looking rather than pedagogical innovators. Physical fitness - not so much basic health - was an attention-getting issue raised by a young president whose own poor health was not thought appropriate for public knowledge. The worry was about too much television, not lack of food (or too many empty calories). Even the adolescent geek felt that he (not "or she") should attempt a Fifty-Mile Hike in one day - and could complete it.

Math was a special case. There was concern about basic numeracy among the masses, but also about deficiencies among the learners at the top of the class. The supposed answer was a radical shift in method, even for the masses, away from mindless (but often efficient and pratical) arithmetic, to understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of even arithmetic at its simplest "two-and-two" level. A Teenage Geek who was recruited to help his mother, born in 1910 and with decades of elementary teaching experience, with her homework in her evening New Math class, had a close-up view of what it was like to learn about "intersection of sets" and "bases 2 and 8" - which, before computers made the word "binary" almost universal, seemed rather unnecessary in a world that calculated with bases 10 and 12.

To put it into one phrase: the unrest and pedagogical reform of the 1960s was about "national defense", as we can see from one of its key pieces of ballyhood legislation: the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which brought into America's classrooms the New Math, science kits and fairs, and even (along with that new Russian) more German, to be taught much better now with the help of science and technology: the Audio-Lingual method and its accompanying Language Lab.

And then there is - but wasn't then - the computer and Information Technology. Word-processing was accomplished pretty much as it had been for the better part of a century: with a mechanical typewriter, regarded as sufficient for any student entering college in 1965. Good keyboard skills were the realm of women being trained for the office, and perhaps of geeks - and such facility did not come with the desktop computer itself in the 1980s, but only with the Internet and the desire of youth to get those URLs and email / texting addresses exactly right, not for any innate love of accuracy but because they would otherwise be isolated from their pals (not yet "buds", whether human or ear-). Actual printing involved lead, not bits, bytes, pixels, and dots; there was no desktop publishing, let alone e-books.

Der langen Rede kurzer Sinn - the practical benefits we draw from comparing today's anxious but also cheerful ("Yes, we can!") STEM push with the 1960s' frightened ("missile gap") campaign to revolutionize science education (with maybe some Russian classes thrown in) are that STEM education must and should be characterized by: 1) particular attention to the sciences that, along with physics and chemistry, are needed for understanding and stewardship of the environment (though of lesser importance for nuclear weapons and plants, or guided missiles): biology and (word not common in the 1960s) ecology; 2) that the STEM subjects must also interrelate with the social sciences, and for two reasons: modern environmentalism must consider economy and equity, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics are parts of maintaining the standard of living in a post-(heavy)industrial society; 3) women and minorities must be included, not only because it is morally right to do so, but because a prosperous society needs all the intelligent and highly-trained citizens it can produce. 4) ••critical thinking literacy etc.

Somewhat questionable or insecure is this, however: 5) the role of languages, and the humanities in general, in STEM.

internationalizatoin

Challenges of the present: for STEM itself; for languages + STEM

Definitions

Pedagogy

Model programs