Journal of Science Education and Technology

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-018-9745-1

STEM Is Not Enough: Education for Success in the Post-Scientific Society

Christopher T. Hill 1,2

# Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
In this paper, I briefly review the concept of the Post-Scientific Society and then present some of the confirming evidence for the aptness
of the concept. This leads to important implications for how we should think about education and workforce development in the
twenty-first century. Both require the incorporation of a very high cognitive level of scientific and technical knowledge with deep
understanding of human wants, needs, and behaviors, as well as a substantial appreciation for how design will affect the success of
those technologies in application.

Keywords STEM education . Post-Scientific Society

Prelude The Post-Scientific Society

When I introduced the notion of the Post-Scientific
Society in an informal talk with the leadership of the
Business-University Forum of Japan in Tokyo in 2004,
further developed the concepts in a report (Hill 2007a)
and a paper (Hill 2007b), and continued talking about it
in numerous presentations in the USA and several other
countries thereafter, I kept anticipating strong disagree-
ment and considerable blow-back from the scientific es-
tablishment. Now, more than a decade later, the disagree-
ment and blow-back have never arrived. Meanwhile, evi-
dence confirming the ideas continues to accumulate.
In this paper, I will recapitulate the concept of the Post-
Scientific Society, discuss some of the confirming evi-
dence for the aptness of the concept, and then discuss its
implications for how we should think about education for
success in the new world that I call the Post-Scientific
Society. My focus is on the USA, although clearly these
ideas find resonance in many places in the world.
* Christopher T. Hill
1
Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University,
Arlington, VA, USA
2
Knoxville, TN, USA
The Twentieth Century as the Scientific Society
Just as earlier eras in human history have been summed up in a
few words (e.g., the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Age of
Exploration, the Renaissance, the Colonial Period, or the
Machine Age), most of the twentieth century can be summed
up, in my view, as the BScientific Society.^ In much of the
developed world, discovery and exploitation of scientific
knowledge became the basis for progress in manufacturing,
medicine, information and communications systems, and
methods of waging war. Similarly, the social and behavioral
sciences were the foundation of advances in managing enter-
prises and the economy, for understanding and intervening to
address social ills, and for shaping and reshaping the behavior
of individuals, groups, and organizations. Science is at the
core of the Progressive movement in politics and for the more
recent trend toward Bevidence-based^ policy-making. For
many in the West, scientific rationalism replaced faith and
revealed truth as the bedrock for understanding the origins
of the universe and of humanity within it.
In the Scientific Society era, advances in science were com-
monly embedded after a time lag in manufactured goods,
medical devices and pharmaceuticals, and other technology-
based products and services. Typically, inventions based on
one, or usually more than one, scientific advance were brought
to market by large firms that did their best to anticipate what
consumers and industrial customers might want to buy.

Feedback from the market performance of new technologies
might lead to further investments in R&D, resulting in both
new scientific knowledge and improved technologies.
The Twenty-first Century as the Post-Scientific
Society
While investments in scientific research leading to advances
in science continue to be made, within the last two decades or
so, many of those advances have been had little direct impact
on industrial production, medical practice, and other applica-
tions. Instead, the development of many key new technologies
has typically required much more than scientific advance—it
has required the merging at a very high cognitive level of
scientific and technical knowledge with deep understanding
of human wants, needs, and behaviors, as well as a substantial
appreciation for how design will affect the success of those
technologies in application. This knowledge and sensitivity to
context is integrated with scientific understanding to produce
new products and services that will succeed in the market-
place. In recognition of this reality, technology-based firms
are increasingly adding designers, psychologists, customer
experience experts, and other non-technical people to their
R&D and product development staffs.
To be sure, success in the Post-Scientific Society continues
to demand the participation of scientists and engineers with
the highest levels of education and experience and there is still
a profound need for scientists who can make new discoveries
and explore the implications of those discoveries uncon-
strained by other considerations. But, new technologies, pro-
cesses, and services almost always have major impacts in the
market and on society when they represent a broad, interdis-
ciplinary integration.
It is no coincidence that the past two decades have also
witnessed explosive growth in entrepreneurship as the mech-
anism through which new ideas find realization in marketable
products and processes. In the Scientific Society of the late
twentieth century, entrepreneurship was unusual. To be sure,
during that time there had been talented and fortunate individ-
uals who built entirely new companies and industries based on
their personal insights and initiative. Nonetheless, the world
turned to the large corporations and their centralized research
laboratories to be the major source of Bthe new^ in the market.
These firms were well organized to keep abreast of scientific
discoveries, to bring new knowledge in through hiring top-
level students from universities, to make liberal use of aca-
demic consultants, and to participate actively in scientific
communities.
During the past two decades, or a bit more, major corpora-
tions have radically reduced their commitments to internal
R&D and have chosen to obtain new technologies via various
forms of Bopen innovation,^ in which they turn to external
sources for new ideas at the front end of the production
J Sci Educ Technol
system. They also outsource much of their routine operations,
including manufacturing, to specialized firms, many small,
but some large and mostly overseas, thus focusing on Bcore
competencies^ that may only tangentially involve technology
development. Some of the major corporations that have
followed this route have fallen on hard times, while others
have thrived. Those that have done well have found ways to
enrich their internal resources for innovation by broadening
the scope of their hiring to incorporate the designers, social
scientists, and others as noted above.
At the same time, the credentials of those who are or would
be entrepreneurs have broadened as well. Some entrepreneur-
ial ventures, by the nature of their origins, are begun by tech-
nical people with advanced degrees and experiences in sci-
ence or engineering. Many other entrepreneurs are drawn
from the ranks of liberal arts, humanities, and social science
graduates or even from those who did not accumulate a degree
before becoming successful purveyors of new ideas manifest
in new and improved products and services.
Who Are the Integrators in the Post-Scientific
Society?
A common theme among those who are successful in business
and other endeavors in the twenty-first century is that they are
Bintegrators,^ rather than specialists. They are able to integrate
a sense of what might be technically feasible based on science
or engineering invention with what might sell based on an
understanding of both expressed and tacit needs of people
and organizations. It would be too easy to imagine that such
people are educated in more than one discipline, though some
are. What seems to be more important, however, is that these
successful integrators are also committed and skilled
networkers. They do not just sit alone in their rooms (dorm
room or otherwise) and ponder the universe until inspiration
strikes them. Instead, they constantly tap into the knowledge
and perceptions of large numbers of people via social media as
well as face-to-face networking. They learn where capabilities
can be found and where opportunities might be waiting for
realization. In this way, they can invent and bring to market
products and services whose every detail they do not under-
stand; the scope of Btheir^ knowledge is the knowledge resi-
dent in their networks.
One finds integrators in successful large firms as well as
small, entrepreneurial ones. However, the bureaucratic struc-
tures of large companies tend to discourage wide ranging for-
aging for ideas and inputs, in favor of a more Befficient^
division of labor that assigns certain people to be expert in
one thing rather than in integrating many things.
Entrepreneurial ventures, on the other hand, are more conge-
nial to people who can put things together quickly and
effectively.
J Sci Educ Technol
One of the characteristics of a small proportion of success-
ful entrepreneurial firms in the twenty-first century is that they
can grow remarkably quickly and to remarkably large size.
One can think of the household names of this era, such as
Google, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon. Some transitions are
relatively smooth; others, like Tesla or Facebook or the early
Apple, discover that managing a very big firm with a few
successful products is not at all like managing a small entre-
preneurial firm with a single product or line of products that
fill a previously unrecognized niche well. Not a few high-
growth Bunicorns^ and Bgazelles^ have foundered on the chal-
lenges of diversifying, managing growth, and being big.
Education for the Post-Scientific
Society—Some Context
One of the jobs of the educational system is to prepare stu-
dents who can participate actively and successfully in produc-
tion, commerce, governance, education, entertainment, and
other key areas of societal activity. We are reminded, of
course, that education is important in ways that transcend
the instrumental—that it expands one’s understanding and
appreciation of history, cultures, beauty, belief, and many oth-
er perspectives on the human condition.
So, what should education be in the Post-Scientific
Society? What should be taught and learned? Where? How?
When?
While much headway has been made in untangling old
ways, much of what education is and does in the West remains
heavily influenced by its origins in the industrial age of the
nineteenth century and its refinement in the Scientific Society
of the 20th. Education remains highly bureaucratic, not only
in the sense that modern educational institutions are heavy
with bureaucracy and administrators but also in the sense that
the intellectual framework through which knowledge is trans-
mitted and understanding is gained is based on a division of
labor and a hierarchy of activity. Knowledge is divided into
disciplines, and further into topics and subtopics, and is usu-
ally taught that way. Students should learn this before than
they learn that, so that understanding develops through repeat-
ed cycles of learning and relearning and correction of simpli-
fications conveyed earlier. Furthermore, in the Scientific
Society, the STEM topics are often regarded as the pinnacle
of education—all else is supportive or peripheral.
Of course, there have been notable experiments in breaking
down the mass production/administrative/bureaucratic model
of education at all levels; some notable for their success,
others notable for their spectacular failures.
If we are to prepare students for success in the Post-
Scientific Society, there are at least three paths forward. The
first path would be to discard the old ways completely—to
build an entirely new approach to education that would
emphasize integration of knowledge from and about every-
thing and everywhere. The second path would be to reform
and modify the present-day ubiquitous educational system on
the margins to introduce greater integration, both of subjects
and of ways of learning and using knowledge. The third path
would be to build on successful experiments and demonstra-
tions of Bbetter ways^ of education that emphasize the unity of
knowledge and the importance of integration.
The first path—to build an entirely new approach to edu-
cation—seems a bridge too far as a prescription for change in
the American educational system. The system is too large, too
fragmented, and too risk-averse to be welcoming of radical
transformation. At K-12 levels, the American public-school
system has already been whipsawed by a generation of well-
intentioned but problematic Breforms.^ Even if one could de-
vise an entirely new system as an intellectual exercise, it
would not likely be welcomed by parents, teachers, leaders,
and supporters of education who have become wary of yet
another prescription to reform or Bsave^ our schools. At the
post-secondary levels, the system of higher education is much
too decentralized to admit of comprehensive reform, however
well founded it might be.
The second path seems most likely to effect real change
over time. It represents a choice to employ the time-honored
American tradition of incrementalism. And, the second path
allows for identification of successful experiments already
underway; that is, a blend of the second and third path seems
best of all.
A Word About Stem
Notice that I have not mentioned STEM explicitly in arguing
for new approaches to meeting the needs of the Post-Scientific
Society. This is not because STEM subjects and STEM’s way
of thinking about the world are not important. Even in a Post-
Scientific Society, science and its cousins—technology, engi-
neering, and mathematics—remain important. After all, even
in our thoroughly modern society, we still hunt and gather,
grow things on farms, build in stone, employ machines, and
so on. New eras do not completely supplant older ones—they
merely reflect a shift in emphasis over time.
On the other hand, I have not put STEM at the center of any
new approach. STEM subjects will remain key elements of
any schooling system for the foreseeable future. However,
they need not and should not be the primary focus and cer-
tainly not the primary obsession of education at any level. Put
another way, BSTEM is not enough!^
It is important to think clearly about the place of STEM in
education. At the extreme, there will continue to be a need for
graduates who are deeply schooled in one or more of the
STEM disciplines. They will need to understand not only
how to use deep knowledge of STEM subjects as engineers,

physicians, technicians, and the like but also how to add to
that knowledge at the frontiers as scientists, mathematicians,
or medical researchers.1 For most people, however, STEM
studies will not lead to deep understanding or creation of
new scientific approaches. Rather, STEM knowledge will be
of a more prosaic sort, informing intuition about the natural
world, providing tools for problem solving, and enabling in-
formed integration of STEM knowledge and ways of knowing
with other types of knowledge.
At this point in American history, for most people, study of
how science works as a way of learning about the world may be
at least as important as learning any particular body of STEM
theory or information. In early versions of my original paper and
presentations on the Post-Scientific Society, I devoted consider-
able energy to working through how society has become Bpost-
scientific^ in the sense that people are increasingly willing to
accept non-scientific information in areas where science has
something definitive to say. In my paper for the AICGS, I
inserted a footnote to reflect these concerns. I wrote:
Other characteristics of the Post-Scientific Society are
less attractive. In brief, they include a decline in general
public understanding of the methods and findings of
science with an associated growth in the popularity of
a very wide range of transcendent modes of
apprehending the world, a general decline in the respect
given to specialized scientific and technical knowledge
in the making of public policy, and a decline in the
popular ability to discriminate between scientific and
pseudo-scientific claims. These are not the focus of this
paper, but [they] deserve serious consideration in the
near future (Hill 2007a).
In the decade since I wrote the above, the need for Bserious
consideration^ of these undesirable characteristics of the Post-
Scientific Society has only grown. Incorporating more
Bscientific information^ in school curricula is unlikely to help
Bstem^ these trends that reflect the declining place of science
in contemporary affairs. Instead, greater attention to how sci-
ence works, to the nature of scientific claims about Btruth,^
and to the institutional context of science is needed to help all
students better understand the often-obscure artifacts and ar-
cane arguments about scientific fact that are so important to
shaping our world and our future.
Stem Is Not Enough/Stem Is Necessary
While science plays a less central role in our society than it has
in past decades, it remains essential. We need highly educated
1
I recognize that pigeon-holing some STEM disciplines as preparing users
and others as preparing contributors draws much too sharp a distinction.
J Sci Educ Technol
scientists and engineers, but they need to be of the Bright
kind.^ At the same time, we need many more people with a
different Bright kind^ of STEM skills to fill an ever-broader
array of jobs and roles that are essential to a modern society.
Furthermore, the ability to understand and evaluate scientific
and technical data and claims made about such data has be-
come a key element of modern citizenship. And, owing to the
globalization of the scientific and technical enterprise, we
need a cadre of Bhunter-gatherer^ scientists and engineers
who can glean the latest understanding developed in other
countries and in a wide array of firms and institutions around
the world.
STEM Professionals of the BRight Kind^
We continue to need highly specialized and deeply trained
STEM professionals who work on the most esoteric questions
with little regard to the world around them. However, most
STEM professionals need bodies of knowledge and under-
standing, as well as skills and appreciations, that are not typ-
ically understood as STEM-related. Among these are:
& Humanities and social sciences, including languages and
the arts
& Communication and presentation skills, both oral and
written
& Management, team work, and interpersonal skills
& Entrepreneurial skills
& Cultural knowledge and awareness
People with STEM Skills of the Right Kind for Many
Jobs
More and more jobs in the modern economy require certain
STEM skills such as quantitative reasoning, ability to analyze
and interpret cause and effect, ability to critically appraise
scientific and technical data and claims made about them,
and the design and interpretation of the logics of orderly pro-
cesses and of technical systems, not to mention a basic under-
standing of the nature of computer software and computer-
implemented algorithms.
The challenge, especially in the K-12 grades, is to figure
out how to prepare a majority of students with STEM knowl-
edge and skills that will actually be useful to them, while
giving a minority of students the foundations of deeper skills
that can enable them to become STEM professionals. To many
educators, this attitude toward STEM education suggests
Btracking,^ with that concept’s negative connotations. Yet, to
ignore these differences is to graduate students who have en-
countered STEM only as a source of irrelevant frustration and/
or to graduate students with insufficient preparation to go on
to STEM-intensive careers.
J Sci Educ Technol
In other words, we need to put aside the notion that we
should strengthen STEM education at the K-12 level as if
we were preparing everyone to become the next generation
of scientists; instead, we should do it in a way that helps
prepare every student for their own work, life, and citizenship.
STEM Skills for Modern Citizenship
A pre-requisite for a healthy democracy is an informed citi-
zenry. In our world, where science and technology are both
pervasive and contested, citizens need to be able to understand
and evaluate conflicting claims about scientific knowledge of
the natural and built worlds. They need to be able to do this
regarding not only the tangible sciences and technologies that
depend on physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics but
also regarding the less-tangible sciences and methods that de-
pend on psychology, informatics, and philosophy. They also
need to be able to understand and evaluate claims in cases
where both the tangible and intangible aspects of STEM are
deeply intertwined.2
It would be folly to suggest that every citizen should be
prepared to understand and evaluate all the new technologies
and all the new claims based on science that he or she encoun-
ters every day. The scope of what must be known and under-
stood is just too great. Each educated citizen, including every
STEM professional, has no choice but to depend on the views
and opinions of others regarding most such matters. Thus, the
real question for most if not all of us is not how to understand
the science but, instead, it is how to distinguish truthful claims
from those based on special interests or deception.
Conclusion
It has become increasingly apparent that something profound
has happened to how we do research and combine the results
of that research with diverse other skills to make competitive
products and services that contribute to the growth, develop-
ment, and well-being of our nation. My argument is that the
essential nature of what has happened is that we are
transitioning from a Scientific Society to a Post-Scientific
Society.
In the Post-Scientific Society, the kinds of skills and abili-
ties that are needed to succeed as individuals, citizens,
2
The widely reported inability of the US Congress to comprehend how the
giant corporation, Facebook, operates during public congressional hearings in
April 2018 is a perfect illustration of the need for improvements in this arena.
workers, and researchers are different from those needed in
previous decades, and they are changing rapidly.
These skills certainly include different sets of STEM skills
according to the roles people expect to play. They also include
many skills that have not generally been thought of as central
to success in STEM careers. Primary among those skills is the
ability to integrate across diverse bodies of knowledge and
understanding.
Many companies and other organizations have evinced an
understanding of these changing circumstances. Education, on
the other hand, remains wedded in large measure to models of
the division of labor and the codification of knowledge that
reinforce barriers to the effective integration of diverse kinds
of knowledge.
We need to do a great deal more experimentation on ways
that education at all levels can be incrementally and effectively
reformed to serve the needs of all our graduates, who will all
live in the Post-Scientific Society.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
This study did not involve any research or other activity by the author
with human subjects of research or with animals.
Conflict of Interest The author has been intimately and personally in-
volved in BSTEM education^ since he entered college in 1960. He holds
three degrees in engineering through the Ph.D. Since the mid-1970s, his
professional career has been focused on science, technology, and innova-
tion policy. In the broadest sense, he has interests, commitments, and
engagements in every conceivable aspect of the subject matter of this
paper through professional engagement, employment, publications, posi-
tions in professional societies, advice, and consulting to the US Congress,
the Government of Japan, and clients in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain,
Sweden, Republic of Korea, Portugal, Colombia, and the USA. To detail
all of my conflicts regarding the subject of this paper would require
presentation of my entire professional c.v.
References
Hill, C. T. (2007a). The American Innovation System in the Post-
Scientific Society, in AICGS Policy Report, part three: innovation
in the United States and Germany: the future, pp. 7–17. On the web
at: https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/PR-28-
Gillette-Innovation-3-FINAL.pdf
Hill, C.T. (2007b). The Post-Scientific Society, issues in science and
technology. Fall, 24(1), 78–84.