Abstract
Ever since the philosophers of the Enlightenment era proclaimed the necessary separation of science, religion and art so that each may flourish independently, many have realized that science has lost crucial aspects of the ‘othered’ disciplines. Values, imagination, creativity and dreams were deemed to lie outside the sphere of the scientific endeavor and were thus avoided. However, at the beginning of the 21st Century, the world has come to realize that in order to solve new and invariably complex problems on a global scale old solutions no longer suffice. Humankind needs citizens who are not only reasonable and science-savvy, but are also creative thinkers, ethically astute and multi-disciplinary problem solvers. This shift in thinking about the present situation and the future has already had an effect on education. In recent years we have seen stirrings of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education in the USA, with the aim of equipping the world’s leading economic power with an advanced scientific workforce capable of maintaining its global dominance. Other leading nations are following suit, chief amongst which are China and Korea. In most other parts of the world, however, science education systems are still struggling to accommodate the previously innovative curriculum perspective of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, which clearly does not yet embrace the arts. In this chapter we address the question of how science education can be transformed to better prepare future citizens by embracing a STEAM perspective that educates future decision-makers who are not only knowledgeable in science but also morally astute and creative.