Usefulness and Bildung: Engaging Students in a Bildung-oriented Engineering Education

In the context of everyday higher education, the concept of ‘usefulness’ seems to be associated with the affordance of a certain skill or piece of information to be applicable/relevant in future professional contexts.

There has been a turn in engineering education toward seeing the future engineer as an agent in society, resolving perceivingly more complex problems, often in cooperation with representatives from other professions. This is reflected in recent policy documents on engineering education. This turn puts some pressure on our colloquial interpretation of ‘usefulness’, as it requires an expansion of skills and knowledge relevant to the students’ future professional lives. In engineering education, the perceived future role of an engineer has changed in recent years, emphasizing the societal role of the engineer. As such, the scope of ‘usefulness’ as understood in an engineering context has expanded, including clear normative connotations beyond mere applicability. In the context of engineering education, this yields providing solutions that take into account ethical, aesthetical, economical, and sustainable aspects, as well as purely technical aspects.

Simultaneously, this more system-perspective and citizen-oriented turn in engineering education connects the education closer to the idea of Bildung, where students are expected not only to become practitioners of a craft, but also active participants in society.

This chapter discusses the contentious relationship between the concepts of Bildung and usefulness, where a theoretical discussion contrasting different traditions and forms of Bildung is illuminated by datasets from 1700 1st year bachelor engineering students across four consecutive years and these students’ motivations toward Bildung-oriented topics.

The students’ profession-oriented motivations and orientation toward usefulness suggest that a Bildung-oriented education based on the idea that there is a conflict between usefulness and Bildung will be unsuccessful in motivating these students to engage themselves in society. An education for engineering Bildung should thus be based on integrating the ideas of usefulness into the concept of Bildung.