In Context

With so many suggestions to improve the engineering education process which include integrating (often times called networking) the curriculum, more focus on design and less focus on the engineering sciences, and implementing more of the project-based learning activities, with all that, the discussion on educating engineers the history of engineering and technology seems to be of less interest.

We all like stories, and humans are story tellers. The origin from which all the suggestions to improve the engineering education mentioned above is the effort to make engineering in academia match as much as attainable engineering as practiced in the field. For example, the focus on project-based learning activities is an effort to make the classroom-lab setting (although not necessarily the best environment to teach engineering) match projects as implemented in reality. So, it’s all about context. The history of engineering and technology is no different in this sense.

When one thinks about it, a certain engineering concept is basically an abstraction, or an ideal, of a complex situation that some person comprehended at some point. This abstract concept seems to be the middle point between two stages: the first stage is the complex phenomenon that once was observed and then was abstracted, and the final stage is when this abstract concept is taken to another complex situation to be applied to. The demand for a technical curriculum to teach as many abstract concepts as possible leaves no place for teaching the context in which a certain concept was abstracted, or, in other words, the history of the discovery.

What is often neglected as well is the fact that engineering itself is practiced in context. The real world provides more context than the academic exercises, and therefore the need to teach history (and context) seems to be more urgent. Engineering is practiced to achieve the needs of a society; it does not exist for its sake but, rather, in the social and cultural contexts that motivates, and constrains, the practice of the profession.

Professor Walter Vincenti, professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, is the author of the book What Engineers Know and How They Knew It. The title glimpses to the fact that there is a context for what engineers know, so why not teaching it? Professor Vincenti is reported to describe the academic community’s view of engineering as “an exotic and incomprehensible activity that goes on ‘over there’.” Teaching the history of engineering and technology can better prepare future engineers to practice engineering in its real context: the society which it serves.