Faux Opposition: STEM vs. Liberal Arts

As highlighted recently in CBC News out of Toronto, about "Why more and more Torontonians are shelling out $10K for coding crash courses" there are tremendous new opportunities for those who low-ego, up-skill, and take on the challenges of learning something new. New bootcamps for every skill, from design to user experience to product management to front and back end development, are empowering people from all walks of life to make their entré into tech. But the logic fails when we think that studying anything before was a mistake because there wasn't always a directly related vocational output on the back-end. If you study psychology and then don't work as a psychologist for 40 years is that a failure? Absolutely not. The exposure to a breadth of ideas, problem solving, complex thinking, confidence, and everything else that goes with an underlying education is exactly what makes aptitude for learning new skills quickly so facile. We ought to encourage STEM literacy and technical engagement, but rather than question the merit of everything done prior we ought to recognize that education is more holistic. My new book, The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World looks at how timeless and timely skills are not oppositional or mutually exclusive, why it's not a question of Liberal Arts vs. STEM, but rather how we preserve and engage the fuzzy and the techie together. To build leaders and societies, to apply our tools to intractable problems, we need people from all backgrounds and educations, learning and applying tech to their foundations.