,
8 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
STEM education’s inability to instill a thorough social theory and history of itself beyond methodologies just so happens to be very useful for companies in that it pits workers against one another in on individualist terms.
Tech workers, for example, do not see one another as belonging to a working class with a working class history worthy of examining. Many male programmers are unaware that their field was once seen as a woman’s job deserving of women’s pay.
And others, even when confronted with that fact, remain dismissive and unsympathetic to issues around pay equality and pay transparency. They would rather side with managers and executives to protect their status than confront past inequalities and challenge current ones.
The inability for the neoliberal education system, which functions as a labor pipeline to private firms, to teach any comprehensive social and labor history of itself means workers cannot contextualize current struggles with their own labor history.
STEM is reduced to ahistorical individualism devoid of self-analysis or self-awareness. Workers do not see in one another a common history and common experience to draw solidarity from and deconstruct existing structures of racism, classism, and patriarchy.
STEM and STEM education especially under late capitalism is ahistorical, its only taught history is that of what forms were used once, and what forms may come tomorrow. There is never a deeper examination of what social relations were/are required to build them.
The current state of STEM education robs people of their creativity to think beyond the current capitalist system of accumulation and provides little social value beyond nebulous bromides about technological progress and changing the world through a technocratic lens.
This is a farce in the face of the constant boastings by technology executives about a supposed bright future of drones, autonomous cars, hyperloops, and next-generation computer graphics that serve as red-herrings to their bankrupt values.
