Yeah, we definitely need more history of science type education.
I cannot speak for every stem degree, but I got my undergraduate degree in civil engineering. I don’t know what all the required classes would have looked like (I transferred in with an associates degree), but I did have to take a history class that everyone was required to take, an engineering ethics class that all engineers were required to take, and a science communication class that fulfilled some requirements but I know for a fact most engineering students didn’t take.
The history class was really valuable to me, even if nobody took it seriously. It had a big focus on colonialism and structural racism, and it was the first time someone explained to me how race was socially constructed in a way that finally made some complete sense (wow, professors can explain things better than people on the internet, who knew?). We also talked a lot about the legal codes that fucked people over—and we touched on eugenics. For the final project in the class, I chose eugenics in Canada, because I had already learned a lot about eugenics in the US and Germany (through previous courses or just… being an intellectually curious minority member online), but I hadn’t heard anything on Canada and I knew from a different class I took that Canada basically copied the US when it came to oppressing minorities, especially Native Americans/First Peoples.
Turns out, Canada had a fascinating and deeply horrifying eugenics program, the worst of which was in Alberta and lasted until the 1970s. This included the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded”, which was disproportionately poor, non-white, especially native, women. This movement was also partially propped up by the women’s movement, who saw themselves as the “mothers of the race”. I highly recommend the book Towards Our Own Master Race for more information.
The engineering ethics course mostly focused on bribery and corruption in civil engineering where people just, did bad work on a road or a bridge or a building to get more money, resulting in shoddy infrastructure and death. And that’s serviceable; it’s by far the biggest issue with civil engineering ethics. We discussed the ethics codes that professional organizations have as well. But we did have some meatier topics, including the final group presentation—a presentation my group gave, but due to sickness I had to present the entire 15 minute PowerPoint all on my own while I lost my voice. It was on environmental racism, a super important topic. Where is waste discarded? Where are factories built? What neighborhoods are destroyed for highways? The answer to almost all of those questions is “poor neighborhoods”, neighborhoods that due to redlining are historically black and also tend to have worse schools, urban heat island effects, and be food deserts as a result of poverty. It was a really meaningful presentation, and I wish we had covered an entire semester on those sorts of topics.
Finally, in my science communication course, we mostly talked about journalism and publishing papers but we also talked about how people lie about science at the danger of the public. Think big tobacco and climate change denialism. Those aren’t just failures of science communication, they are the result of bad actors explicitly lying to the public to cover up death and risk. That’s super important.
One last thing; as a civil engineering student with a focus on environmental engineering I did learn a lot more about risk factors and how to keep the public safe than like, a general civil or structural engineer might. And through that I learned a lot about the truly awful history of hazardous waste dumping in this country. We did learn a lot about ethics, “not killing the public” was a pretty basic thing we were taught, and eugenics doesn’t really apply much to civil engineering, but we SHOULD LEARN MORE. A history or science/engineering course wouldn’t just be interesting, it would be important. That ethics course was pretty light on the ground when it came to philosophy, and a few of my peers were legitimately interested in more. Cultivating responsible scientists and engineerings is super important, and it cannot simply be at the level of “don’t lie about research” and “don’t accept bribes”.
