mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (04/13/88)
I am not involved directly with computer education, but I am in higher education, in Chemistry. I'd like to put in my $.02 worth on the "generalist" vs "specialist" controversy in higher education. I sincerely feel that, at least for persons in the sciences and engineering, that it is vital that students have as much "hard science" as possible crammed into them as possible, even, if it comes to a serious pinch, at the expense of time spent in liberal arts. The average chemistry or chem e. student leaves here with some sort of generally useful knowledge about their field, but their core of really useful stuff is rather small, and their depth abysmally small. In chemistry, and in certain other fields such as civil and mechanical engineering, lack of knowledge is not only a handicap, it can be deadly. Bridges can collapse, cities can get gassed with methyl isocyanate (and I got gassed with the damn stuff just yesterday, from a stupid student who didn't know how nasty it was, even after all the to-doo about Bhopal!), and o-rings can fail. Some of this stuff is negligence, some is damn-the-safety-lets-save-a-buck management, but lots is just plain lack of knowledge. I, or any of my students, could have predicted the Challanger fiasco based on general properties of Viton at low temperatures. Apparently nobody at NASA had the slightest idea about this (although the Morton Thiokol engineers most certainly did- they EXPECTED the thing to fail! ) Any one person can know only a tiny little bit, but every little thing helps. I frankly think that college should be a place to learn practical, important, things about a person's chosen profession. There is plenty of time in high school for generalities. (The amount of time wasted by the college-bound student in mickey-mouse high school courses is generally conceded, I think). DougMcDonald Professor of Chemistry University of Illinois Urbana