Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The policy and scholarship of STEM education take for granted the idea that students must be prepared with competencies of problem-solving and decision-making through STEM practices for civil life. Drawing upon the theory of historical and social epistemology (Daston, 1995; Popkewitz, 2013), I problematize the governmental power historically implicated in this idea by asking: what make possible problem-solving and decision-making to be thought as the fundamental and universal literacy of science and democracy that order particular ways of learning and living in curriculum practices. In this paper, I first review the literature in the history of social/science that has critically analyzed the knowledge-power relations implicated in collapsing science, democracy, and human/nature after World War II. Then, I examine how problem-solving was circulated in transnational curriculum reforms with systems analysis of human quality (Peccei, 1979/2013) and human learning (Botkin et al., 1979). With the fear of a sudden global catastrophe prognosed by the Club of Rome (OECDA, 1969) and the economic boom of Japan in the 1980s, learning and curriculum were “innovated” in the US and other OECD countries to be anticipatory (Shane and Tabler, 1981; OECD, 1979). That is to prepare students for the most-likely future by asking them to simulate problem-solving and decision-making in “collected” contexts. This innovative effort did not challenge the status quo as it intended but reinscribed it by objectivizing the potentialities of human body-minds as the infinite resources that could be controlled scientifically for problem-solving and decision-making to actualize the events without “surprise.”