Lending Human Touch: The Role of Humanities in Engineering Education

Abstract

There is a growing awareness that professional engineers need a substantial acquaintance with a variety of subjects traditionally taught within the humanities. This argument reflects the claim put forth on many fronts that modern, scientific technology poses many challenges that can only be addressed by the insight of the humanities. This radical change of direction forced various engineering educators to respond more adequately to the ‘technoscience’ challenges and to introduce subjects in engineering  such as ethics, literature, philosophy, culture, history of technology and aesthetics which can be called ‘engineering humanities’. The purpose of this paper is to explore the indispensable need of inclusion of humanities in engineering education for regaining the human factor in technological questions. This paper argues that due to the perception that engineering profession is ‘hard hat’ technical in nature, it requires application of broad knowledge of human affairs in engineering practice.