2c) They’re not doing humanities “alongside” engineering, but within engineering. You’re obviously not buying into my definition of the humanities method. If you did, you’d realize that there’s no way to integrate it with engineering classes. Engineering classes are lecture – the prof has knowledge that he needs to impart to you. Humanities classes are discussion-based, experiential, and tentative, none of which are characteristics of engineering classes. The methods are incompatible.

3) “Why wouldn’t you want engineers to be better people?” Ugh. Why don’t you demand they get a pony too? All things have costs. We need to debate whether they are worth the costs. Pretending costs do not exist will get us nowhere. It’s not that I don’t want them to be better people. I just think that the aim of an ENGINEERING education should be producing competent engineers, not producing better people.

You’ll need to justify using Jurassic Park as an example, since their only unambiguous faults were taking insufficient safety precautions and employing a saboteur.

Finally, I think that you have an overblown sense of the importance of ethics in engineering and the importance of the humanities in most people’s daily lives, an over-optimism about the potential efficacy of this curriculum, and a lack of knowledge about how engineering and engineering education work. I don’t think our disagreements are resolvable.

Also, we should really start a tag-team blog to have these arguments on. I bet some of our friends would enjoy it immensely.

[Behold! The genesis of this blog!]

Related Posts

1. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down?
2. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down? (Part II)
3. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down? (Part III)
4. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down? (Part IV)
5. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down? (Part V)
6. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down? (Part VI)
7. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down? (Part VII)
8. Engineering Education: Dumbed Down? (Part VIII)