Supporting the Proposition

It has been only a little more than a decade since a professional consensus emerged concerning the need to formulate an alternative to industrial arts. Few question the importance of technology education, or the need for a new name to characterize the program area. Technology education, however, is at a critical juncture. What can be questioned is the ability of the profession to clearly articulate the educational role of technology education. Just what is technology education, who does it serve, and for what reasons? And how is technology incorporated into its program struc-ture? There is not yet a professional consensus concerning these fundamental questions. The subject field is still struggling to clearly define its educational purpose, and the educational public is not sure why technology education is important in the school. In part, the uncertainty surrounding the curricular dimensions of technology education is due to the newness of the field. It is also due to the complexity of technology itself, and the difficulty in reducing the concept to cur-ricular elements. Yet, if technology education has difficulty defining itself, how can the subject field be explained in terms that the educational public can understand and value? And today, in a period of limited financial resources, changing educational priorities, and greater accountability, the subject field is vulnerable to budget cuts and replacement. Other educational alternatives will continue to challenge technology education's place in the school unless we do a better job in defining who we are. I would like to suggest that a major reason for the ambiguity surrounding technology education is the inability of the profession to constructively build from its historical roots, industrial arts. The profession has attempted to formulate a framework and a rationale, and GUEST EDITARTICLES On the proposition that technology education leaders have neglected important qualities of industrial arts education has created programs while largely disregarding the historical foundations of the field. It has ignored basic curriculum concepts that historically have undergirded program design and that are understood by the educational public. The Failure to Build From Industrial Arts In the haste to stake out a separate curriculum claim for technology education, there was a conscious effort on the part of many within the profession to distance themselves from industrial arts. " Traditional " industrial arts was highly criticized as being outdated, unresponsive to technological change, and focused too heavily on manipulative activities. The attitude seemed to …