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It is important to reach back to origins, for a sense of the pure intent of advocates, to establish baselines prior to trying to assess contemporary proposals for the advance of technology education. It is well to understand too that technology education is a subject still in the making (See Layton, 1994). This paper examines the phenomenon of pre-engineering as the most recent claimant to the technology education tradition. I will be arguing that preengineering is the latest evidence of a decided turn away from the blue-collar traditions of the field, toward white-collar academic traditions. While it constitutes an epistemological advance, pre-engineering also represents a decided sociological calculation, that hopes to make the subject more palatable to the tastes of the academics who run schools, and the middle and upper classes, whose children turn away from the base subject after the compulsory stages in the middle grades, as they fix their attention on the college track, and upon professional careers. The rest of the paper is organized as follows (a) What is pre-engineering? (b) How widespread is the practice of pre-engineering? (c) Why has pre-engineering become a prominent...

Disciplines:

• Science and Technology  / Engineering