Humanities in Engineering Education

The need for humanities in technical curricula can be explained in part by the impact technology has on our society. Engineers are the class of people who contribute most, and most directly to the changing face of the earth. So they should have at least an idea of the context they are working in. Humanities, on the other hand, have been on the loosing side since World War II. This calls for some reconsideration. The ever more urgent call for languages, management and law competencies for engineers is an expression for this. Humanities can and must play an important role in every well-balanced engineering curriculum.     

Lifelong Education: a duty to oneself?

ABSTRACT There is a strong pragmatic argument that in our times, dominated as they are by continuous change, one's education needs to be a lifelong process. But can another, different, argument be made that lifelong education is a moral duty everyone owes to oneself irrespective of any other pragmatic justijication? The answer evidently depends largely on whether the notion of a moral duty owed to oneself is an intelligible one. In effect, it turns out, on examination, to be very problematic. It is suggested rather that a moral duty to educate oneselffor life can be more coherently grounded in another different notion: one of membership in one's community regarded as a ‘learning society’.