The history of STEAM education

STEM/STEAM Day is celebrated on November 8. There’s no way around it: children are significantly better off with strong science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics skills. That’s why STEM and STEAM education programs are so important. It’s undebatable that these subjects push society forward, and these programs help to find fun and engaging ways to teach them to students, which is all worth commemorating. So, on November 8, we celebrate STEAM/STEAM Day!

To celebrate this day, support the education of students pursuing STEM subjects by learning about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics scholarships offered by institutes around the world.

History

As most educators and many observers know, the pendulum swings quite often in education, and the prevailing political movement tends to influence the reforms of the time. We saw a back-to-fundamentals approach after World War II, a time fraught with conservatism and McCarthyism. In the 1970s, we saw a post-Sputnik loosening of rote memorization and drills in favor of more equality-based and individualized learning. The Tech Boom of the 1990s and 2000s brought us a modern-day Sputnik call—this time, in the form of a percolating tech explosion so considerable it demanded that educators shift their focus once again. And that instructional shift had a name: STEM.