Abstract
Over a century ago, in response to a complaint about a faculty member’s teaching strategies, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents issued a statement declaring that the purpose of higher education was to foster unfettered exploration with the faith that both faculty and students, if given the time and tools, would decide for themselves what to believe. The Regents’ now-famous phrase “sifting and winnowing” emphasized the importance of the process of discovery, rather than mastery of rote knowledge, as crucial to true education, and served as the foundation for academic freedom as we know it today. The educational notion of sifting and winnowing, born in a time of clashing political philosophies and cultures, can serve as a guide for building engineering ethics curricula for a newly globalized world. But this exploration need not mean a free-for-all. Scaffolded learning can bring structure to the process of building students’ capacity for independent, creative work in a wide variety of circumstances and cultures. This combination of organization and autonomy, counterintuitive though it may seem, provides an ideal grounding for globalized engineering practice.
Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state university of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.
University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, 1894
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Notes
- 1.
Catalogs of engineering ethics cases addressing these and other issues are available from the Online Ethics Center (onlineethics.org), the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (niee.org), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (www.asce.org/Ethics/A-Question-of-Ethics/), among others.
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Pfatteicher, S.K.A. (2015). Sifting, Winnowing, and Scaffolding: Structured Exploration for Engineering in a Modern World. In: Murphy, C., Gardoni, P., Bashir, H., Harris, Jr., C., Masad, E. (eds) Engineering Ethics for a Globalized World. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18260-5_15
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