How can the philosophy of education inform STEM Education Policy in schooling and higher education in a post-Covid pluralist and democratic Ireland: Growing back better

In this paper I make the case to open for critical scrutiny the purpose of STEM education policy in schooling and higher educaton in a post-Covid pluralist and democratic Ireland. Until now the policy (political) framing (representation) of STEM education policy in Ireland and elsewhere draws from a postpositivist stance of techné that is advocated by the state and industry and connected to transdisciplinarity, nature of science, science-in-context, skills sets and evidence-based inquiry scaffolded through one engineering model of STEM Pedagogy. The SMART (Self-regulated, Motivated, Adaptible, Responsible and Technologically competent) STEM student and teacher learns to fit in with a consensus view of the ideal human and demonstrate their comparative performance as measureable outputs (‘what works best’). The critical scrutiny of STEM literature conducted here shows that we live in a fast globalising and digitising world where UNESCO (2021) asks us reimagine a new social contract for education. It is a timely question given that children and young people are nowadays growing up in a highly scientific and technological society where questions of the good life and STEM literacies need to be freshly interrogated. Here I share insights gleaned from a select literature review revealing the dilemmas of our time and offering new signposts forward. STEM education that balances science, philosophy and practical wisdom and underscores the limits of scientific reason in order to prepare students on one hand to combat populist anti-science attitudes and on the other to prevent falling into a narrow ‘scientism’.