No, I'm not obsessed, either with Brussels or the blues, but I do have a bit of this and that I have to work through yet. Here's another notion that's been haunting me for the past couple of days: STEM.
Once you get even a little close to any kind of bureaucracy, you start getting overwhelmed with acronyms and abbreviations. I guess bureaucratic days are so full that they just don't have time to speak in full words. STEM stands for "Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics", and it alludes to those disciplines of learning and study that we need to emphasize if we are going to remain competitive as an economic area and if we are going to advance as a civilization (whatever that means). We simply don't have enough people getting into these areas and over the day-and-a-half in Brussels there was a lot of urgent debate and a lot of wringing of hands, how we were going to accomplish this. I don't know about you, but I find the whole issue rather odd.
STEM is supposed to be about hard science, mathematically rich disciplines of technology (whereby I think IT is most often meant, as if there weren't any other kinds) and engineering. I suppose it's only physicists, mathematicians, technologists and engineers who get anything done. OK, it is an American neologism. I suppose that explains a lot more than we might like to think. Young people are apparently not all excited about entering these fields. They are perceived as too hard, too demanding, too complex, or are they simply uninteresting? The surrounding discussions remind me of those I've heard from church representatives regarding the lack of attendance and participation of young people in church. Their answer is make it more "attractive": more singing, dancing, role-playing, play-acting ... whatever, so that it will be "fun" to go to church. Yes, if we could only make STEM more "fun", then wouldn't young people flock to it in droves? Well, to be honest, no.
The world in which we're called to work these days is anything but fun. Employers think that so-called smart technology can make you accessible 24/7, so now your employer has access to you 24/7. If you come up with a good idea, it belongs to the company, not to you. When you enter the workplace, you leave your conscience at the door and sell your soul. I, for the like of me, can't figure out why young people aren't lining up for that. By the way, once your current skill set is no longer productive, you're out, and by the way, we're not going to pay for your development, personally or professionally, you have to do that on your own, especially on your own dime, and by the way, I'm going to pay you well, but not nearly enough to make repaying those student loans too easy; nothing worth anything should be obtained too easily. Yes, that's the world I'm inviting you to, so why aren't you beating down my door to get it? Yeah, I don't understand it either.
One young panel participant near the end said that he got into technology because of three concepts he had gleaned from the book The Hacker Ethic which he referred to as freedom, challenge, and impact. I took this to mean that he was driven by wanting to do things that may not be easy but needed to get done in such a way that others would benefit and, as is often stated so blithely, that the world would be a better place. I found it fascinating that the motivators weren't anything related to STEM. Those things are just means to a much bigger -- may I say, softer -- end.
I really have to ask myself. Who's not getting it?
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