History

In today’s class, each of us in our Youtube group talked about our own paper, which summarizes the issues of engineering education in a certain time period. After that, we start to merge our findings of different time periods and try to find how engineering education evolve for a longer time period. It is very interesting. It seems that the issues for a long time ago are still under intensive debate today. For example, should engineering education emphasize more on science or practice? These stories happen again and again in the history, and they will probably happen again and again in the future. Later, more questions came out of my mind.

Since these stories happen again and again, can we use them to predict the future? My answer is yes. But can we predict all the stories? My answer is no. There should be something new that will happen in the future and have not yet happened. Is history just repeating? My answer is no. I think although these debates happen again and again, the social context for each of the cycles is different from each other. Something should be improving as a function of time. It may be the society or technology background. It may be other things.

It is also very interesting that although the stimulus of the birth of engineering education in different countries (US and Europe) is different, they all happened. However, it did not happen in China before the World War I. Why?

At last, history is always summarized by historians, so in my opinion it is always biased to some extent. The bias may come from the limitations of vision of the historians or the pressures from the society they lived or other factors.

What are your opionions?