Engineering education in the post modern era

Abstract

Modernism, especially as it embodies scientific rationality, continues to be essential to cultural identity. Science and analytic reason, for instance, remain at the core of engineering practice. Yet, engineering education, as preparation for engineering practice, though it has traditionally embraced the modernist project, is already well on its way toward an incorporation of some principles and strategies that can only be called post modern. In this paper the author points out where he sees post modern ideas becoming important in engineering and what new directions for engineering education might be possible in the wake of the post modern turn.