[modeleng] Re: Engineering education - rant

40 years or so ago, as a technician apprentice at The Marconi Company 
Ltd., in Chelmsford, we got a workshop practice course. use of lathe, 
mill, surface grinder etc etc. Not that I was any good at welding....
At college, we did technical drawing ( but in the first year 
only),electrical engineering, radio engineering, applied mechanics, 
physics, and social studies, which was  a posh name for three lessons a 
week - industrial and commercial law, industrial psychology and labour 
relations, history of industrial development  and industrial health and 
safety. We also did a course leading to a qualification in technical 
writing. Colege was either one day and one evening a week, or sometimes a 
13 week sandwich.

17 years later, my wife did a degree course and got a 12 week workshop 
practice course. So she knows how to use a lathe, mill, etc, although 
hasn't used them for years.

Today's new graduate knows how to use a computer, but not how the circuits 
he's designing really work, or how to put them together, or often even 
really how to measure the results. So we get results quoted to an 
impressive number of decimal points with an accuracy to perhaps the first 
one of them

Have we advanced?

The other thing that you get (eventually) from learning how to make things 
is pride in your workmanship, even if it's just in the design of circuitry 
or whatever. I suspect that in the future, only model engineers will be 
able to get that.

Peter Chadwick

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