The NSW education minister Rob Stokes has labelled the emphasis on STEM subjects in the education system “intellectual snobbery” and calling the acronym a “buzzword.”
STEM refers to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths, and has been a government focus since 2015, when all national education ministers agreed on a 10-year plan to boost results.
Mr Stokes, delivering the Balmoral Lecture at Sydney’s Queenwood School, bemoaned “people of influence… piling in to denounce the value of philosophy, the arts, and the social sciences.