One of the things I did this past holiday season was read the recently published book by columnist Thomas Friedman "Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in a World of Accelerations" which was given to me as a gift by my brother Wim. The book is a lengthy commentary about how to succeed in the zippy twenty-teens.

One of the concepts that Mr. Friedman embarks upon is what it will take for us as a society (and indeed as a species) to successfully transition this period of extremely rapid change in technology, society and environment. This ability is something he names stempathy, in other words, capacity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math coupled with the empathy for other human beings so as to be able to communicate and incorporate these concepts.   Mr. Friedman is onto something here, because at the same time that science and its kin are becoming ever more complex, it continues to confound many on how to get most people to understand and grasp them.

Fair enough, but let's have a closer look at this concept of stempathy and break it apart. First,empathy itself is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.  But the question is how does one really GET the ability to understand and share feelings of another?

For starters, I believe that the model undertaken by extension services, since we are scientists and teachers after all, is by design is the perfect vehicle for stempathy. Rather than simply alighting from afar to spend a few hours with people to share some newly discovered fact out of context in an unfamiliar patois to boot, Advisors and extensionists live, work, play and yes (sigh), on occasion, fight in the communities they have been assigned to serve.  As such it is near inevitable that they come to understand a lot of people they are around, come to understand the language and get to understand the culture.  In other words, the extensionist cannot but help become empathetic to those around them.

Moving on to the subject of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, I find that communicating these concepts is far more that just instructing people about a jumble of unconnected facts without a coherent whole. Science after all is really more of a state of mind, an empirical approach to understanding the world and fitting ones' knowledge within it. A state of mind is going to take way more than a few hours a year to bring across, and so the teaching and learning of science is a long-term commitment - as in years - not only on the part of the teacher, but also of the student.

Thus the developed concept of stempathy should not be, no matter how likable or charismatic the messenger, the work of one time meetings, some presentations dashed off for 20 minutes in a place with people whom one does not know, or putting up research papers behind password protected walls. Rather, it's about bring science, technology, engineering and math day after day and hour after hour into a community of people of whom one is already a part.