sydneypageDESMA9
Week 1 - Two Cultures - Sydney Page
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher divided us into groups in our subjects based on ability levels. I remember that for reading and writing, I was in one of the highest-level groups, but for math, I was among the students that had greater difficulty. These groups shaped what electives our teacher helped us choose for middle school the following year.
The Changing Educational Paradigms invited me to recall my elementary school experience because it represents the industrial model the video mentioned. Sorting children into groups encouraged our specialization in our stronger subjects, which ultimately could make us better contributors to the economy.
I’m a Public Affairs major. Public Affairs includes the study of public policy and I’m interested in it because it represents how to use data and science to create solutions that improve people’s lives. I don’t think the field of public policy should be defined as one culture or the other because as CP Snow argues in Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, dividing can lead many capable minds to ignore the opposite vocation, in which case we will fail to solve the world’s problems (15).
I feel the separation of study on campus. On my freshmen orientation tour as a joke one of the tour guides said that North Campus’s sculpture garden included a lot of feminine pieces because more women historically studied there.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics High School Longitudinal Study demonstrates how the separation of humanities and science is a gendered issue (Redford et. al). Women and girls are often steered away from STEM fields while men are often encouraged not to pursue the arts. This is reflected in the graph below from that study.
Both Vesna's "Third Culture: Being in Between" and Kelly’s “The Third Culture” encouraged me to think about how artists using technology represent a dynamic in between that may be an exciting bridge for the future. I don’t have a lot of experience with this concept and am excited to further explore that idea in this class!
REFERENCES
Graham-Rowe, Duncan. “John Brockman: Matchmaking with Science and Art.” WIRED UK, WIRED UK, 3 Feb. 2011, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/matchmaking-with-science-and-art.
Kelly, Kevin. “The Third Culture.” Edge.org, 1998, https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-third-culture.
Radford, Alexandria, et al. “High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) Second Follow-up: A First Look at Fall 2009 Ninth-Graders in 2016.” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a Part of the U.S. Department of Education, 1 Feb. 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2018139.
Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. At the Univ. Press, 1959.
Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–125., https://doi.org/10.1162/002409401750184672.
Hi Sydney! I really resonate with your blog as I was also better at reading and writing as a child and struggled with math. But in my blog I talk about how I was pushed to improve and now am a STEM major. I think that what you talk about in terms of the gender divide in the "two cultures" is so important in both of these examples. I felt like I always had to study extra hard to "prove" that I could do math, science, etc as well as or better than the boys in my classes. I think that if we broke the gender binary the two culture divide would also be abolished.
ReplyDeleteHi Sydney! I really liked your blog and how you connected it to how this separation of the campuses could even be gender divided! I looked more into the study and it is so relevant to even a campus like UCLA.
ReplyDelete