Breaking Out of Boxes: STEM, HALE, and the Space Between

This evening, I was reflecting on a conversation I had with my sixth formers. We were discussing how, as students, you’re often seen as either STEM or HALE, as if these two categories are in competition. It struck me how deeply ingrained this divide has become, and how it seems to shape not just our education system but the way we perceive our own abilities and potential.

We live in a world obsessed with categories. From the moment we start school, we're sorted, labelled, and packaged. STEM. HALE. Athlete. Artist. Logical. Creative. As if the entire spectrum of human potential could be boiled down into a handful of neatly labelled boxes.

And now, with the rise of AI, this obsession with categorisation feels even more pronounced. AI is built to detect patterns, to sort, to classify. It’s taught to understand us through the boxes we’ve created for ourselves. But is this really all there is to us?

Let’s back up. Think about those labels: STEM and HALE. For years, there’s been this push to focus on STEM—science, technology, engineering, and maths—as if these are the only fields that matter in a rapidly evolving world. And sure, STEM skills are undeniably important. They’ve brought us breakthroughs in medicine, space exploration, renewable energy, and yes, AI itself. But when did we decide that HALE—humanities, art, language, and english—was secondary? That it was somehow less valuable, less vital?

AI is a perfect mirror for this. We’ve trained these systems to think like us, to mimic our priorities. And when we force ourselves into boxes, AI reflects that back to us. It recommends books based on what people "like us" read. It curates job postings based on our perceived skills and background. It’s a loop: the narrower our labels, the narrower AI’s view of who we are and what we can become.

But here’s the thing: no one fits perfectly into one box. The engineer who writes poetry. The artist who loves data analysis. The teacher who spends weekends coding. We’re all a blend of interests and abilities, a messy overlap of STEM, HALE, and everything in between. And that’s not a flaw; it’s a feature.

AI, for all its brilliance, doesn’t yet know how to embrace the chaos of human potential. It’s too reliant on the data we feed it, too quick to assume that past behaviour dictates future capability. It’s up to us to push back against these assumptions. To remind ourselves and the systems we create that being human isn’t about fitting into a box. It’s about breaking out of them.

What if, instead of designing AI to reflect our categories, we designed it to challenge them? What if AI could look at the artist and see an innovator? At the coder and see a storyteller? What if it could encourage us to explore the edges of our interests instead of doubling down on the safe, predictable middle?

We don’t need more boxes. We need bridges. Bridges between STEM and HALE. Between logic and creativity. Between who we are today and who we might become tomorrow. AI can help build those bridges—but only if we let it.

The question, then, isn’t just why we insist on fitting into boxes. It’s what we’re missing when we do. Because the world doesn’t need more labels. It needs people brave enough to defy them, and systems smart enough to celebrate that.