“What will or should engineering education be like today, or in the near future, to prepare the next generation of students for effective engagement in the engineering profession in 2020?”

This report asks how to enrich and broaden engineering education so that technically grounded graduates will be better prepared to work in a constantly changing global economy.

Recommendations include:
* The BS degree should be considered as a pre-engineering or "engineer in training" degree.

Engineering needs to develop iconic images that the public immediately recognize and respond to in a positive way.

MIT President Charles Vest: "This is the most exciting period in human history for science and engineering. The explosive advances in knowledge, instrumentation, communication, and computational capabilities create a mind-boggling playing field for the next generation.

Georgia Tech's Wayne Clough is the chair of the committee that produced this report.

Educating the Engineer of 2020

Drucker would be deeply saddened ...

... about the troubling state of curiosity ...

In the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. Today, "it's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

Upon graduation, we must devote ever more energy to mastering the floods of information that might help us keep our wobbly jobs. Crunched, we have little time to learn about far-flung subjects.

The narrowcasting of our lives is writ large in our culture. The Internet slices and dices it all into highly specialized niches that provide mountainous details about the slightest molehills.

When people only care about what they care about, their desire to know something more, something new, evaporates like the morning dew.

The notion of an aspirational culture, in which one endeavors to learn what is right, proper and important in order to make something more of himself, is past.

Unfortunately, this new freedom has sucker punched the notion of the educated person. Instead of a mainstream reverence for those who produce or appreciate works that represent the summit of human achievement, we have a corporatized and commodified culture that hypes the latest trend, the next new thing.

Curiously, in a world where everything is worth knowing, nothing is.

Lack of curiosity is curious

Only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are scientifically savvy and alert. Most of the rest don't have a clue.

At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process.

American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

Scientific Savvy? In US, Not Much

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

Many Going to College Aren't Ready, Report Finds

Schools are complex social settings where students, teachers, administrators, and parents interact to shape a child’s educational experience. Any effort to improve educational outcomes for America’s children requires a dynamic understanding of the environments in which children learn. In "The Social Organization of Schooling," editors Larry Hedges and Barbara Schneider assemble researchers from the fields of education, organizational theory, and sociology to provide a new framework for understanding and analyzing America’s schools and the many challenges they face.

"The Social Organization of Schooling" closely examines the varied components that make up a school’s social environment. Contributors Adam Gamoran, Ramona Gunter, and Tona Williams focus on the social organization of teaching. Using intensive case studies, they show how positive professional relations among teachers contribute to greater collaboration, the dissemination of effective teaching practices, and ultimately, a better learning environment for children. Children learn more from better teachers, but those best equipped to teach often opt for professions with higher social stature, such as law or medicine. In his chapter, Robert Dreeben calls for the establishment of universal principles and practices to define good teaching, arguing that such standards are necessary to legitimize teaching as a high status profession. "The Social Organization of Schooling" also looks at how social norms in schools are shaped and reinforced by interactions among teachers and students. ! Sociologist Maureen Hallinan shows that students who are challenged intellectually and accepted socially are more likely to embrace school norms and accept responsibility for their own actions. Using classroom observations, surveys, and school records, Daniel McFarland finds that group-based classroom activities are effective tools in promoting both social and scholastic development in adolescents. "The Social Organization of Schooling" also addresses educational reforms and the way they affect a school’s social structures. Examining how testing policies affect children’s opportunities to learn, Chandra Muller and Kathryn Schiller find that policies which increased school accountability boosted student enrollment in math courses, reflecting a shift in the school culture towards higher standards.

Employing a variety of analytical methods, "The Social Organization of Schooling" provides a sound understanding of the social mechanisms at work in our educational system. This important volume brings a fresh perspective to the many ongoing debates in education policy and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of America’s children.

The Social Organization Of Schooling

This op-ed by McSweeney's editor Dave Eggers is something of a follow-up to Tom Friedman's recent Behind Every Grad ... column.

One day they're shaping minds, a moral force in the lives of the young people they teach and know, and in some ways the architects of the future of the nation. The next day they're serving cocktails and selling plasma TV's at the mall.

The authors have written a "punchy, thoughtful" new book, "Teachers Have It Easy": The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, which received a Starred Review by Publishers Weekly.

Reading, Writing, Retailing

Were you inspired by a school teacher? Did you thank them?

We are heading into an age in which jobs are likely to be invented and made obsolete faster and faster. The chances of today's college kids working in the same jobs for the same companies for their whole careers are about zero. In such an age, the greatest survival skill you can have is the ability to learn how to learn. The best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who inspire.

Like all the best essayists, Tom Friedman can transform even the most obvious message into a compelling story.

Behind Every Grad ...

Students are able and willing to attend to issues of readability and surface error only when they have written something that is of enough value to make the arduous task of making it readable worth the effort.

Stanley Fish's assignment - asking students to create their own language - is brilliant! At last an educator who gets students to think about language.

Sometimes a student needs to step outside her own conventions to see that she was trapped by them in the first place. And when she understands the logic behind the rules and conventions, she is no longer trapped, but freed.

Remember: continous learning.

I am routinely appalled by writing that is not edited for correct syntax beyond these computerized quick fixes. The result is something that at best sounds unprofessional and at worst is incoherent.

As am I, and I'm not talking about the work of students.

Writing clean English sentences is a learned craft. And like any other craft, it requires practice and guidance. But what student, confronted with contemporary popular artists of all stripes, wants to be a craftsperson?

As long as artistry is perceived as celebrity, and not the embodiment of art, the acquisition of skills is less necessary than an ability to generate clever ideas.

Very true.

What You Write, How You Write It

This spirited and wittily instructional little volume is not a grammar book; like a self-help volume, it "gives you permission to love punctuation."

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Each touch connects what is essentially an electrical circuit — and each piece of fruit changes the resistance in the circuit. The Cricket measures that electrical resistance and plays a different note each time it changes.

Toy Kit Builds a Craftier Kind of Robot