STEAM...Now!

The STEAM Journal Volume 1 Issue 1 Luminare Article 8 March 2013 STEAM...Now! John Eger San Diego State University, California, USA Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam Part of the Art and Design Commons, Economics Commons, Education Commons, Engineering Commons, and the Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons Recommended Citation Eger, John (2013) "STEAM...Now!," The STEAM Journal: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 8. DOI: 10.5642/steam.201301.08 Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss1/8 © March 2013 by the author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivatives License. STEAM is a bi-annual journal published by the Claremont Colleges Library | ISSN 2327-2074 | http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam STEAM...Now! Abstract With America slowly awakening to the need to turn out creative and innovative workers who can join the 21st century (its already 2012) workplace -- because they have the new thinking skills --we have to change the current emphasis on STEM, for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math to STEAM, by insuring that the whole brain is nurtured through the arts: thus STEAM. Author/Artist Bio John M. Eger, J.D. is the Van Deerlin Chair of Communications and Director of the Creative Economy Initiative at San Diego State University (SDSU) and writes about creativity and innovation, education and economic development. Earlier, was an executive of CBS Inc. Professor Eger was Advisor to President Richard Nixon and President Gerald Ford and Director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP). He served on the Presidential Initiative on Privacy, the Cabinet Committee on Cable Television, and the Ad-hoc Committee on Regulatory Forum. He also serves as the founding President of the World Foundation for Smart Communities, a non-profit educational effort designed to help local communities connect to the global knowledge based economy. Keywords STEM, STEAM, 21st Century Skills, Education, Policy, Design, Creative Economy Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in The STEAM Journal: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss1/8 Eger: STEAM...Now! STEAM...Now! By John M. Eger With America slowly awakening to the need to turn out creative and innovative workers who can join the 21st century (its already 2012) workplace -- because they have the new thinking skills --we have to change the current emphasis on STEM, for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math to STEAM, by insuring that the whole brain is nurtured through the arts: thus STEAM. STEAM- including the arts and art integration-has become the threshold issue in this effort to reinvent our schools, our communities and our nation. To accomplish our goals, however, we desperately need to be willing to change the paradigm, reinvent our schools-the very concept of education- and meet the challenges of a global economy. During the Clinton presidency democratic strategist James Carville, was fond of saying, "it's the economy, stupid" (Eger, 2010) much the same could be said today. The stimulus and all the federal policies in the world will not help if all we do is prop up the old economy. It is rather the new economy, the creative and innovative economy, begging for attention. And it is our educational system where we must start. John Howkins, author of ‘The Creative Economy’ (2007), says that anyone with a good idea can make money. He defines creative industries as occupations like advertising, architecture, graphic design, filmmaking, authors, painters and the like which you can count in the few millions. Richard Florida, author of ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ (2002), claims thirty-eight million people as among the new creative class. In what is clearly a more expansive definition of 1 The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 [2013], Art. 8 the term "creative," Florida (2002) includes professionals in business and finance, law, healthcare and related fields “these people engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital... all are members of the creative class" (Florida, p. 8). However, it does not matter in the short term what we call this new economy or how we measure it. Both are right... a new economy is emerging and it is huge. It is an economy requiring creativity, imagination and innovation. It is an economy that is global, technology driven and knowledge based. There is a trend here, like a tsunami really, shaping our world and our workforce as never before. Daniel Bell, author and Harvard sociologist, in his 1973 book ‘The Coming PostIndustrial Society’, looked backward in time and noted how the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney transformed the farm, forced people into the cities and created what we now call the Industrial Revolution. Computers and telecommunications, like the cotton gin of an earlier era, were bringing about yet another shift in the economy that he called the post-industrial society. Bell's treatise was the first significant effort to identify structural changes in society leading to the Information Age. Yet here we are struggling to define yet another shift in the basic structure of the world's economy. We know it's global, and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has told us it's "flat." It is also technologically driven by the pervasive spread of the Internet. But it is creativity - simply defined as "the quality or ability to create or invent something original" - that best defines the characteristic most of us need to succeed in the new economy. What is important is that we-as President Obama has said-recognize that a whole new economy and society is emerging and that, as a consequence, it is of vital importance that we http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss1/8 2 Eger: STEAM...Now! reinvent our communities, our schools, our businesses, our government to meet the challenges such major structural shifts are compelling. It may not happen at the Federal level, it probably will not because of the gridlock in Washington, DC. But it can and should happen in the state and local and regional communities across America. Every man, woman and child needs to know and understand that the tectonic plates of the world's economy have shifted. The task of recreating any city-any community- housing, transportation, roads and bridges, clean water electricity, schools, is enormous. The task of creating a knowledge city, a creative and innovative community, is equally complex. Yet cities must prepare their citizens to take ownership of their communities, build the broadband communications structures the workplace needs, and educate the next generation of leaders and workers to meet the new global challenges of what just has now bee (...truncated)