Today marks the end of my first week as a student at Tufts University. Amidst the whole ruckus of getting settled in and acclimatizing to the environment and structure of college life, I was faced with a task I had never had full control of; selecting my classes and deciding how I wanted my schedule to look like. As a member of Tufts University, I had the option to major in Computer Science through either the School of Arts and Sciences and The School of Engineering. On one hand the School of A&S would afford me a wider breadth and more room to explore my interests, and on the other hand, the School of Engineering would enable me to take more classes and provide more depth in my STEM studies. This got me thinking about why a degree from the School of Engineering almost completely eliminated any interaction with more 'liberal-artsy courses', and I realized that this stems from a more fundamental misguided approach to education in the US's educational system.
The US educational system is slowly and surely getting populated with Science and Tech magnet schools, and Schools of Art. This is a system which completely inhibits the ability of students to more freely explore interests and find new things that they excel at. Once a child takes piano lessons at say the age of 5 and their parents determine that he/she is a musical prodigy, the child is sent to a School of the Arts to better develop their talents, shutting off their access to explore other possibilities. The human brain is a complex organ capable of excelling at multiple tasks, and so making the assumption that a talent in specific field eliminates the possibilities of excellence in other fields is quite illogical. Once children who are exposed to program-specific high schools then get to college, they are less likely to try out things outside the region of their expertise because they have been led to believe that they are only good in one thing, thereby limiting their potential and ultimately marginalizing their range of opportunities.
The latent problem is that magnet schools that are known for their program-specificity are receiving the bulk of federal funding, inevitably leading to them having better equipment, facilities, and resources than their less limiting counterparts in the form of public schools. The causal effect is that parents prefer to then send their children to these better equipped, 'upgraded versions' of the traditional high school without realizing how detrimental it could be to the educational career of their children. This problem is a vicious cycle because the level of interest of parents and families in these magnet schools lead to the government favoring them over public in terms of funding, leading to even more reason for parents to enroll their children in them.
In my opinion, the divide between arts, sciences and tech education should be completely eliminated and a STEAM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Sciences) model adopted that promotes interdisciplinary studies and nurtures multiple interests. In truth, most ground-breaking innovations have come from interdisciplinary ideas, and so it is only logical that high schools and post-secondary institutions adopt a model like this that can serve as a breeding ground for innovation and create a new generation of individuals that are trained to succeed across multiple disciplines.
