Philosophy of Technology and Engineering

Abstract

Since the second world war, technical education was, and I would argue still is, considered to be vocational in nature. Formerly, technical education was considered to be a training ground for boys who were considered to be less academic as informed by an intelligence test administered at age eleven. Girls were also tested and similarly, those who failed the test were streamed into the study of domestic science, a vocational training for their futures as housewives and mothers. This ideology followed the basis of the academic – vocational divide or the Cartesian brain versus the body debate. Alas, these debates continue in a variety of formats to this very day, albeit politically nuanced in the actual delivery of a more sophisticated school system. The delivery of Technical education today has undergone a metamorphosis into what we now recognise as Technology education. However, many would argue that technology education continues to lack a critical and philosophical perspective as stated by Goodman:

Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. [ … ] Technology must have its proper place on the faculty as a learned profession important in modern society, along with medicine, law, the humanities, and natural philosophy, learning from them and having something to teach them. As a moral philosopher, a technician should be able to criticize the programs given him to implement. As a professional in a community of learned professionals, a technologist must have a different kind of training and develop a different character than we see at present among technicians and engineers” (Goodman, 2010: 40–41)

The following chapters in this section offer a variety of critical and philosophical perspectives on the technology education.