In many places around the globe, September is back-to-school month, when children return to schoolrooms with a mix of emotions from excitement to fear and everything in between.

This is also the time when parents, guardians, and other caregivers—myself included—first give a sigh of relief that the school holidays are over and kids will finally have something to do, before immediately starting to worry about the curriculum and whether children will receive the education they need to set them on the path toward future success and happiness.

If you live in the United States, you've likely been hearing over and over that the path to success and a great career leads through STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Indicators suggest that STEM jobs will steadily increase in the U.S. over the next decade, and many efforts on the local, state, and federal level are aimed at strengthening STEM education as well as changing the attitudes of young people toward STEM.

Enter STEAM, an effort to include arts in core STEM education. One argument that STEM proponents use to support their case is that arts are critical for creativity and empowering our ability to innovate, rightly pointing out that we'll be able to create solutions for our global problems and transform the world only through dramatic innovation. The global appetite for merging science, technology, and arts seems to be trending upward—just look at the incredible interest in TED events, which bring together scientists, entertainers, artists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and innovators to share their ideas, get inspired, and inspire.

Many businesses are also ramping up their interest in design thinking, which is all about creating an emotional connection between humans and technology. Design thinking is far more than adding a designer to a team. It's about changing the culture to encourage creating multiple solutions to a problem, rapid prototyping and testing, and accepting (perhaps even celebrating) failure—exactly what some advocates for STEAM point out needs to happen in education.

For design thinking or similar approaches to work, we need diverse teams with members who appreciate each other's perspectives and value what each individual brings to the table. This table should and will need to include scientists and engineers, as well as designers, business professionals, artists, social scientists, and others. The thing is that finding solutions for complex problems requires diversity.

This brings me to the second major argument of STEAM proponents—that adding arts to the STEM mix will fix the gender and racial gap, where, at the high school level, we already see that the student population in STEM is mostly male and mostly Caucasian and Asian. Many believe that STEM subjects are being taught in a way that does not engage the interests of students and make science, mathematics, technology, and engineering feel disconnected from reality and real life. This disconnect appears to be affecting the interest of girls and minorities to a more significant degree, and it results in a STEM community that lacks diversity, which, in addition to being unacceptable, on a moral level, has a multitude of real-world and economic implications, given that diverse teams outperform those with less diversity (see here, here, here, and here).

Opponents of STEAM find both of these arguments misplaced. For many, the arts as a human endeavor don't belong in the same group as STEM. Arts are about emotions and perceptions; STEM is about facts and reason. And if we stop to think about it, we can't help but agree that arts, and for that matter humanities, exist and operate under a completely different set of rules and in a different universe from science and engineering. This makes adding "A" to "STEM" seem out of place and unnatural.

Many also find the idea that adding arts to STEM will fix the diversity problem to be misplaced and even insulting. This has come up in my conversations with women in STEM, some of whom find it disturbing that there are people out there who think that the only way to get girls interested in science is to make science class similar to a crafts project. Some of the efforts like IBM's Hack a Hairdryer and the European Commission's Science: It’s a Girl Thing! video (above) both led to a massive uproar and illustrated a general insensitivity when it comes to encouraging and supporting the STEM interests of female people.

So, which is better, STEM or STEAM?

I gave this a great deal of thought, and my answer is NEITHER. This is, of course, a disappointing answer for those who hold strong views on either side of this question, but it's a practical answer based on personal experience and the reality of what it really takes to be a well-educated and well-rounded individual.

First of all, I feel very strongly that science, engineering, technology, arts, and humanities are all part of human intellectual activity. Therefore, education, if it's to be effective and successful, needs to feed all these interests and nurture them without discrimination. In my personal experience, it was incredible to be encouraged to pursue both scientific and creative writing interests with the same intensity. Being a prolific writer throughout elementary, middle, and high school, as well as during college and PhD training, made me both a better scientist and a better writer.

I'm a definitely a scientist in my heart and in my mind, but as with all other people, I'm more nuanced and complex than that. At different times of the day, month, and year, I like to think of myself as a writer, an artist, a recipe developer, a crafter, a couch philosopher, an educator, a reluctant gardener, a citizen, a politician, and so much more. If I don't want to commit to being only one thing, why would I want the education that I, you, my children, or anybody's children go though to be monolithic and binned, one-dimensional, or conforming to four-letter, five-letter, or any-number-of-letters acronyms?