From my perspective, I wake up every day in this absolute beautiful mystery of a universe. I cannot get that out of my mind. It's just too exciting. Call it whatever you want - a simulation, a divine right of passage on to something else, the matrix, a metaphysical drama - the reality is that there seem to be puzzles. Puzzles that, if understood (as proven by experiment), promise the re-shaping reality. This could be as simple as cooking a steak according to a new recipe and tasting the results. Steaks now taste better (hopefully!), or they don't and you move on.

It doesn't matter if we:

• Terraform Mars
• Automate [insert thing]
• Create general AI
• Cure death

If we continue to:

• Believe these things will happen automatically - how many people are really working on the above?
• Value tools and memorization over understanding and derivation - see any software engineer job posting; how public ed teaches STEM
• Deny systemic thinking - "grow" at all costs; worry about what definition of growth is valid and the consequences later
• Eschew fields, waves, and probabilities - immigration is bad or it is good, I am right and you are wrong, and tiny little balls called electrons orbit the nucleus like a teeny solar system (how convenient!)
• Pretend like this thinking hasn't permeated the minds of our scientists and engineers*

I wanted to make things - great - so does most every other engineer. There is likely no stopping the rate of technological progress - but that's not necessarily a good thing. Technology has arguably supplanted government and even family members as the largest shaper of individual realities. If few people are even equipped to begin understanding and contributing to tech, the natural consequence is that few will control the tech. That's a recipe for a new-age feudal system. No thanks.

Luckily, many projects are open-source, so we have a solution to access (it just needs to scale more). The worrisome thing is the ability to contribute is diminished, and will follow the trajectory set by our incompetent traditional educational system. This is not taking into account the on-tap distractions and advertisements that are scientifically designed to keep you coming back for more, just like a slot machine. There is a war on focus, and focus is the resource of innovation.

schoolofstem.com is my humble beginning to attempting to contribute to a solution.

*Sean Carrol, a physicist at Caltech, posits that a large number of his colleagues - world-class physicists and scientists - do not care about the why, only the how. This is consistent with my experience in industry, across automotive, aerospace, academic and software sectors.