Abstract:

Article deals with actual non-technical courses at Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture at University of Zagreb, Croatia, with regard to recent developmental strategies aiming to improve education of engineers at technical universities across the world. These strategies have implicated greater accent on cooperative knowledge systems and have resulted in broadened scope of non-technical subjects and courses at technical universities' curriculums. While the general presumption is aimed to qualify engineers as able to act in unpredictable social environments and not only to "function" as well-educated performers – our research suggests that implementation of reformed educational programs is limited by relative ambiguity in acceptance of content and extent of non-technical topics.
This conceptualisation also corresponds to paticular contemporary research in engineering education that has shown that relationship between education and profession was mediated rather by transfering core values of dominant culture (for instance - work ethic) than by integration of professional skills and knowledge into the students' developing human potential. While it has been historical trend that lasted through the entire twentieth century, recently it is overshadowed by aggregated emphasis made by so called educational triple helix – business, govermnent and university – directed to the imperatives of knowledge society.
The outcome of that process seems to be ambiguous: although official objectives of educational system are directed toward development of aplied knowledge and skills, business sector and employers express some sort of disillusionment with academic curriculum's fundamental aspect and inability of newcoming young professionals to succesfuly embrace work tasks emediately. However, dominant values reside within just mentioned matrix as a hidden but important element implicating that the whole process is a reflexion of broader structural consequences of "flexible capitalism". Its theoreticaly and practicaly challenging aspect within educational context of engineering is adressing a question of meaning and content of non-technical subjects and courses. They have to balance between, on the one side, hidden ideological consenquences of imperatives toward aplicability and, on the other side, its own imperatives to challenge aplicability as a manifestation of dominant social order. Our findings point at persuasive effects of intelectual tension that manifests itself in process of dealing with contradictory nature of proclaimed and achieved educational imperatives.

Keywords:

Work, education, engineering profession, non-technical courses.