Training up visionaries

Recently, in an online back and forth about our government’s H-1B visa system, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy expressed concerns about the quality of our country’s high tech work force. Musk worries that we have too few “super talented engineers” and Ramaswamy thinks that we “venerate mediocrity over excellence” while we downplay the importance of mathematics.

Both men support the H-1B visa, which many tech companies use to hire highly skilled employees from other countries. But regardless of their views (or ours) on these visas, sprinkling the work force with highly competent tech workers doesn’t give us a full picture. And in any case, being an excellent engineer or scientist requires more than knowing a lot of facts about science, even when combined with mathematical virtuosity and practical know-how. These are crucial, but by themselves, they tend to produce mere technicians or calculators. “Super talented” engineers and scientists need more, namely, creativity, innovation, and the ability to see the big picture—how everything hangs together. And by “everything” I mean more than just “the science part.” I also mean the humanities, including language, history, philosophy, and even theology. In fact, focusing only on science and mathematics can result in worse engineers and scientists. Good athletes don’t train only one side of their body.

We used to know this. After all, the great scientists of previous generations received a broad, deep “liberal arts” education, which not only gave them knowledge of language, philosophy, mathematics, and science; it also taught them how to think deeply and creatively—even about mathematics and science. From Kepler to Galileo to Newton to Einstein, their liberal arts education made their visionary science possible. And they said so.

Einstein was certainly clear about the necessity of such a curriculum: “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” It's not that specialization is bad. But, Einstein warned, “It is not enough to teach man a specialty.” That, he says, will merely result in a person becoming “a kind of useful machine” or a like a “a well-trained dog.” Again, it was Einstein’s knowledge of philosophy and history that made possible his revolution in science.

But Einstein’s attitude was largely lost after World War II. The United States became a victim of its own success. Technology had helped the Allies win the war, and so American scientists were encouraged (through funding) to focus on practical applications rather than develop new scientific theories or even just better understand their current theories. Applied science won out over pure science. And so educational institutions began strengthening their science curricula, but mostly with the goal of practical applications, not for science itself. Physicists, for example, were discouraged from discussing the bizarre implications of quantum mechanics and were essentially told to “shut up and calculate.”

Science has nurtured this attitude, which is particularly noticeable in physics. Of course, to us on the outside, the shut-up-and-calculate strategy looks to have paid off handsomely. But there’s now a crisis in physics, a 40-year stagnation. The two main pillars of physics—general relativity and quantum mechanics—contradict one another. Something new is desperately needed, but there’s no consensus on where to go from here. Physics is again at a crossroads, as it was in Einstein’s time, and we again need visionaries, not merely calculational virtuosos.

And so Christians have a tremendous opportunity here. We have the freedom to develop our own education, one that truly combines the sciences with the humanities. We’re not tied to a philosophy of uber-pragmatism. Christians also have a worldview that makes sense of integration: God made the world as a unified whole, all its parts wonderfully interconnected. And Paul tells us that in Christ all things are held together, which presumably includes all the disciplines. So who better to forge new paths in physics (for example) than people who know its Creator and have taken that fact seriously in all areas of education? To be sure, it isn’t always obvious how to do this, but be encouraged that we’re currently on the steep part of the learning curve where small improvements yield large benefits.

And we don’t have to wander aimlessly. Past generations can teach us. Naturally, we won’t merely reenact their education; we’ve learned a lot since then. We also have different problems. For one thing, the way we teach mathematics seems designed to keep students from gaining true mastery. We cover too many concepts, too quickly, thinking that all mathematical concepts are created equal.

In any case, Christians have a unique opportunity to bless our culture through a new kind of revolution in science. But as before, this is going to take visionaries.