> It was my impression that high schools and parents were the mechanism for indoctrinating youths into community values. Moreover, without playing too hard to p

> It was my impression that high schools and parents were the mechanism for indoctrinating youths into community values. Moreover, without playing too hard to personal experience, if my classmates at uni are tomorrow's leaders I'm a great deal concerned. Obviously, parents and pre-college education are important (though if they're doing their jobs well, I wouldn't refer to what they're doing as "indoctrination"). But why should education in cognitive, moral, aesthetic, political, etc. skills end with high school graduation? Your second sentence here underscores this point: today's 18-year olds are not fully-formed citizens, ready to become "tomorrow's leaders" without further development. > What are these "hard problems"? Hunger? Disease? Working boring jobs to shuffle little bits of paper around? I'd wager that the root of your "hard problems" is ultimately scarcity in one form or another, and the only way to address that is through technology, and the only way to get that is through STEM training. Hunger and disease are hard problems, yes. And of course, having people with technical training is required for solving them, and for solving any problem that stems from some kind of physical scarcity. But hunger and disease are two hard problems that are particularly easy to conceive, and whose solutions are likewise readily understood: basically, more food and better medicine. Once a problem and its solution are understood, implementing the solution is very often a matter of working out the technical details. I think that many of the hard problems facing us are not so easily conceived, and their solutions once conceived are far from obvious. For example: what, if anything, should we do about rising income inequality? What consequences does polarization in political discourse have for our ability to address the divergent needs and interests of different groups of people? Which of our social norms are beneficial, and which are harmful? What reasons do we have to support the production of fine art or architecture, and how (if at all) should we do it? What rights and treatment should our institutions afford to those (prisoners, revolutionaries, the merely uninterested) who directly or indirectly undermine them? I think these questions---and others like them, which we might not even have the language to express yet---are some of the hardest yet most important questions to answer. But they don't boil down to questions of "scarcity" in any obvious way, and I have a hard time seeing how technical training could ever help produce citizens who are capable of answering them in a reflective and reasonable way. That doesn't mean that STEM training isn't valuable. And as I said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187739 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187739) many STEM programs are liberal arts programs that do provide the skills required to answer questions like these.