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Don’t weed, nurture
September 1, 2006

In an earlier post I cited a report that contends that American students drift away from engineering and other technical fields because of unimaginative teaching. I also cited educators’ response: the migration to other fields is part of a natural weeding out.

I called that view way off base, and Dean Kamen, speaking at the NIWeek trade show earlier this month, seems to agree. If you have an engineering program that only a third of enrollees complete, he said, that’s seen as a good, macho thing. In reality, he added, it reflects a poor curriculum. “Education shouldn’t be a weeding-out process,” he said, adding, “It should be a nurturing one.”

Of course, keeping students in technical fields is only part of the problem. First, you have to get them there, and that’s not always easy. As I’ve argued previously, technologists can have difficulty promoting their profession to their own children.

And some technologists don’t even try. Kamen suggested that more common career advice takes this form: “The world is a cruel place—full of injustice. You should become a lawyer and profit from it.”

To see what Kamen himself is doing to promote technical professions, see my Editor’s Note in the September issue.

Posted by Rick Nelson on September 1, 2006 | Comments (0)