|
There is nothing more sure, I am told, than that there is a great gap between the arts and the sciences. And the gap between the arts and the applied sciences is necessarily greater still. This is one of the reasons that we offer science courses to the students of the arts and why we offer arts courses to the students of the sciences. This is done, we are told, so that they will not remain simply immersed in their special interest, whether it is English literature in the seventeenth century or the engineering of propellers, That is to say, it is done to broaden them, to as we also say "liberalize" them. What I have just characterized is a central presupposition of present-day university education, especially at the level of a first university degree, whether it be in Engineering, in Physics, in English or in Music. There is a science, invented by Aristotle, that looks at presuppositions. It is called metaphysics and usually it is the philosophers who care about it because Aristotle looked at it first. It doesn't have to be the case that because an ancient Greek philosopher first looked at something, it has to stay in the exclusive purview of the philosophers. For example, physics, which was also a central interest of Aristotle left the purview of the philosophers after a number of people in the 17th century, who called themselves "natural philosophers", invented the modern discipline of physics in much the form which is used in Engineering today. But today we don't think that either those who are still discovering and inventing physics or those who use it should be called natural philosophers, except in rare cases--such as Bohr or Einstein. The presupposition that I mentioned at the beginning, namely, that the arts and the sciences (including the applied sciences) are radically separate entities has many consequences. For example, because we think of them as entirely different kinds of enterprises and commonly assume that entirely different kinds of individuals with entirely different casts of mind engage in each. But if presuppositions can have such consequences perhaps we should explore a little more about what kinds of things presuppositions are. First of all, everything that we think or do involves presuppositions. Thus when we go for a walk we assume a certain stability of the terrain, that it won't simply disappear and reappear randomly. When we go backwards without looking we assume that the world behind us is just as it was a moment before when we looked. We assume that measurements are much the same under the same conditions and that when they are not the same the conditions must have changed in certain systematic or regular ways (temperature increased or decreased, for example). Some of these things which we take for granted could be expressed as answers to certain kinds of simple questions and might be considered as true or false. And others, those which lie deep, are prior to the possibility of questions being asked at all. Both kinds are important and it is also important to be able to know just which kind one is dealing with. For example, the assumptions in Engineering or in Physiology that there is causal regularity in the world (namely that " all events have causes") lies at the deepest level and is placed such that it cannot be questioned by anything done in Engineering or in Physiology. It is an "absolute presupposition" of Engineering or Physiology. Interestingly, in parts of physics today, the assumption of causal regularity is not placed any longer the way it is in Engineering orPhysiology. At the level of quantum mechanics, I think, that "no events have causes" is what is presupposed. But that is another story. This history of the universities is partly behind the presupposition the applied science and the liberal arts have nothing in common. Let me pause for a moment just to sketch how this came about. The universities originated in two places roughly a thousand years ago: in Italy, where they were begun as professional schools run by students and in France, in Paris, as extensions of the local cathedral school which worked from a curriculum common in the Roman Empire. The Paris model, in due course, became the dominant one and the professional faculties, originally Theology, Law and Medicine, became largely dependent upon the Faculty of Arts as the only route to them. Thus every professional, for the better part of the last thousand years had a liberal arts degree prior to entry into the professional school. This is still true for Medicine and Law, as a rule. Newer faculties, of the kind which Engineering or my own faculty, Education, represent developed largely in this century and originally independent of the universities. Engineering was either an apprenticeship craft or else taught in separate post secondary institutions such as Technical Schools in Germany or in Britain. Education was initially, at least in North America run out of separate professional schools called Normal Schools (indeed the initial "faculty" in this university began as a Normal School on the SAIT site initially independent of, but the later part of, the University of Alberta). The net result of this history is that some professions were connected with the movement derived from the University of Paris and others were not. And Engineering was not, and, like Education nor traditionally one of the "learned" professions. Indeed, while universities were building in the Middle Ages there were quite independent professions with apprentices and masters who worked as stone-masons or as architects or as bridge-builders (perhaps in the army), or as devisors of military hardware or the like with their own standards, their own mysteries, their own "degrees" quite parallel to the university. Thus there are good historical reasons why Engineering is not directly connected with the liberal arts in the fashion of Law or Medicine and also why it is not considered a liberal art. But are there any other reasons? I mean, other than historical ones? Now what, exactly, is a "liberal art"? To the medieval university, and until about a century ago in the English speaking world, a liberal art was a "free art", that is, a scholarly discipline without a practical end. The learned professions were supposed to supply the practical ends. It seems a little quaint today to realize that the "seven" liberal arts were classified as a trivium, consisting of logic, rhetoric and grammar and a quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Our word "trivial" comes from the trivium, but there was nothing particularly trivial in our sense about these medieval studies. You can see, of course, that there is an immediate connection between the traditional liberal arts and many of the things which an engineer must be proficient at. An engineer must be able to communicate in a logical and convincing way with her or his client. And this requires logic, rhetoric and grammar. So, implicitly, at least, an engineer requires the kind of skills which a training in liberal arts was supposed to provide to a professional. And it is obvious, too, that an engineer often must be skilled at things to which the quadrivium also pointed, namely, good at calculation in an exact way. Good at the kind of combination of things which earth measurement and astronomical measurement provide. I suppose that Geomatics and the engineering spin-offs from these are as modern as you can get. In my own student days an engineer had to be competent in surveying and of course surveying is just a combination of the measurement of the earth (geometry) and the relation of that, often, to position on the earth determined by astronomical measurements. Thus, the first three of the four quadrivial studies actually turn out to be very close to concerns of engineers in our own day, however much they have been advanced since the middle ages. Music, I am told, is often a special interest of engineers, although as a pastime, not as part of their professional activity, But music, as the early university understood it, is not the study of singing or playing musical instruments so much as what we would call the mathematical study of music. Thus it was essentially the study of the properties of vibrating strings and of vibrating plates, tubes and the like. And these, today are also studies of considerable interest to engineers. A friend of mine, a lover of music and an amateur musician when he is not plying his nuclear engineering trade, made a momentous discovery in an engineering detective tale. The Pickering reactor outside Toronto, was a magnificent project with a massive problem: the fuel rod casings kept cracking and nobody knew why. This had never happened before in Canadian nuclear reactor projects, not at NRU at Chalk River, not at the Douglas Point CANDU reactor, not in the Canada-India reactor, not anywhere. Why was it happening at Pickering: A singer can crack a glass when she or he hits the right note and a sympathetic frequency is met in the glass. This possibility occurred to my musician-engineer. He went off to Oxford to study the theory of vibration, the Sturm-Liouville equation and its solutions. On his return, a combination of theory and practical experiment proved beyond a doubt that it was the vibration from the pumping motors carrying the coolant through the reactor which was the culprit. Modern physics probably owes its first dynamic exactitude in the studies of Galileo to the fact that Galileo's father was a musician and Galileo himself no mean musician. Galileo reversed the usual medieval study of music as a study of vibrating strings and their properties to the practical use of the fact that musicians, playing with vibrating strings, for example, play in various tempi which they can reproduce more or less exactly. As a consequence it was possible for Galileo to use the performance of musicians to exactly time a variety of motions, including accelerated ones in an age prior to the clock measurements we take for granted in our own era. These examples illustrate, or tend to illustrate at least, how in certain respects, the liberal arts as originally understood are actually part and parcel of the truck and trade of practicing engineers (assuming that Galileo could be equally described as an engineer or scientist) and probably part of most programs in engineering as they are offered today, although part of them are part of the hidden curriculum, not the explicit one. But is this all we can say about the relation of engineering to the liberal arts? I think we can also explore a much deeper connection than even these. I think there is a potential, and perhaps an actual, connection which as great power and which presents a real opportunity for the study of Engineering or Medicine or Law or Education or Nursing or Dentistry or Architecture and so on. It has to do with what results when something is studied in depth and its possibilities are pursued. When something is pursued in depth, it tends to lead to everything else imaginable. Thus, for example, if we look at, say metallurgical engineering in depth or metallurgy in depth, not only do we become led to try to understand the history of metallurgy, of where and when it began, of what the ancient techniques were (famous engineer, Ursula Franklin, of the University of Toronto and her studies in ancient Chinese metallurgical techniques in brass), but we may also be led to study the culture in which it occurred. We might find ourselves, for example, realizing that the myth of King Arthur as the man who could take a sword from a stone is the story not of a strong man, or a man with magical powers, or of a man with a particular knack, but the story of a man who could identify a kind of stone which contained iron ore, and who possessed the knowledge of how to smelt it, to carbonate it, to hammer it and so on. Namely, it is a story about an engineering process written in a romantic form. Thus an engineer might be led to poetry or to history and on to the techniques, still common among some living Swedes, of how to make a "forest knife" or a "forest swore", a knowledge common among the Vikings. What I want to suggest is that, in the hurry of modern instruction, with the classes and labs that go on from eight a.m. to six p.m. every night, five days a week, there is often not time to notice that there is a liberal component to engineering or to any other profession. And this liberal component, if noticed, might attract others (young women, or young men with real talent but who might otherwise become physicians, or historians or philosophers), to the profession of engineering. But is there a way in which one might re-cast the curriculum so as to meet the licensing body or bodies of a profession and still recognize the liberal nature of the professional activity? I think there is. In many ways the profession of Medicine is interestingly parallel to that of Engineering in that it is a practical study with a number of definite ends in mind. Traditionally Medicine has been studies first by studying the basic medical sciences and then, after their mastery in theory and in laboratory study, a medical student sees practical problems in the form of patients. This pattern owes its origins in a report written by Abraham Flexner earlier in this century in which he studied and commented on the state of medicine as a profession in the United States and Canada. The recommendations in his report led to a tremendous advance in medical education in North America. Indeed it created a professional program, as I have mentioned, rather like present day Engineering schools in many respects. Lots of lectures, lots of practical quizzes and problems, lots of labs, and then some practical experience in the form of projects (patients) later in the program. John Evans, a former President of the University of Toronto and the Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation for many years, was the founding Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the McMaster University some thirty years ago. He asked: Why cannot Medicine be a liberal art: Why cannot medical students learn their theory in the real context of real problems? Why cannot problems in the form of real patients with real human health difficulties lead students to study in an expansive context with no upper limits? On this basis a revolutionary professional program was begun at McMaster which was practice oriented and problem based. The idea is that each problem is studied, not as a mere exercise in diagnosis and treatment, but as a problem which can be pursued in many different directions: the history of the problem, the underlying philosophical assumptions of that history, the social and personal and psychological context in which the patient finds her or himself and the appropriate sociology, anthropology or history of the situation. The impact of the McMaster model has been very great on nearly all medical schools in North America, including the Calgary school. Indeed, Harvard now educations like McMaster--and of course, in the States it is now referred to as the Harvard Model. My suggestion for Engineering, especially a bold Engineering School like that at the University of Calgary, seriously consider re-casting its curriculum and its instructional techniques along lines which would bring out the liberal nature of so many of the problems and tasks in Engineering. Not only would this make the Engineering school at Calgary unique on the planet, but the graduates would be explicitly, rather than implicitly, schooled in Engineering as a liberal art. The above was originaly written as a talk to the Schulich School of Engineering in the fall of 1996, University of Calgary. Revised May 26, 1997. Written by:
For further information please contact:
|
Dean's Series | Schulich School of Engineering | University of Calgary