South African engineering faculties as professional facilitators in the future
educational resource
posted on 2024-11-18, 15:32authored byInaugural addresses
Inaugural lecture--Department of Electrical Engineering, Rand Afrikaans University, 23 April 1997@@Recent years have seen radical changes in the South African education system, and as a result the number of school-leavers aspiring to tertiary education has increased dramatically. These school-leavers have needs, aspirations and attitudes derived from back grounds assumed to be
very different to what has gone before. The result is that a different type of engineering student could be emerging on the university campuses. On the other hand, the engineering profession requires certain skil1s, attitudes and knowledge that are derived from the nature of technology, and are not subject to any human factors. The university therefore needs to match these possibly widely disparate entities. This paper sets out to examine the needs of the Engineering Profession, describe the nature of the South African University and attempts to analyze the mismatch between the Profession, the Universities and the emerging generation of school-leavers. Some radical proposals which would reconcile the various components of this system are put forward.