To Understand Science, Study History

By Alejandra Dubcovsky. I love the sciences. Because my father was a scientist, I grew up surrounded by talk of running gels, western blots, and poorly calibrated centrifuges. I desperately wanted to be a scientist. First and foremost, to prove to my dad that I could—he was convinced that science was not for me. But also because its importance was easily understood by others. I did not have to explain why I wanted to study science or even what I wanted to study. Throwing out the word "science" seemed to calm anyone’s anxiety about my future. That anxiety is at the heart of current debates about the growth and importance of the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and, in turn, the decline of humanities majors. Why should students major in English when they could be engineers? Don’t computer-science majors make much more money than those who study philosophy? What does a classics major even do? Science matters, period. The humanities, on the other hand, are interesting at best and superfluous at worst. Or so the current debates, which pit STEM against the humanities, lead us to believe. More...