A Reform Of Higher Engineering Education:Breaking Out An Encirclement Of Disciplinarity

Engineering education in our country is constructed according to science education model, the problem of its theory in disagreement with practice has been most obvious one in higher engineering education field after discipline oriented organization in90’s20th century, and this problem will upgrade further under the circumstance of the popularity of cultivating "research type" talents.The course of history is always similar, engineering education in western country; its rudimentary stage of engineering education is two centuries earlier than ours, once experienced the same scientific developing path by the influence of positivism and scientism. Then, how this kind of scientific development pattern is formed?In university, an institutional place of knowledge production and dissemination, all educational practices will be involved in discipline."Disciplinarity" the concept both points to knowledge itself and more to its social system. Disciplinarity in this paper has two meanings:it first is a research perspective, for it is a disciplinary function theory proposed based on discipline birth and development. It focuses on explaining why knowledge production becomes current situation. Therefore, disciplinarity theory can be regarded as a better force to construct the item "disciplinary person". It is also a valuable research issue, that is, after science entering into university field, how disciplinary means of science education build and influence the overall talents cultivation pattern.In18th century, natural science entered into university, it promoted forming modernized discipline system, transformed the characteristics of knowledge:standardized, normalized and precise theoretical logic system——it becomes the legal origin of disciplinary power. Just in the process of scientific institutionalization, the "conspiracy" between knowledge and power and the supremacy status of knowledge can be uncovered. Moreover, knowledge production and individual cultivation order built on discipline is science discipline,essentially. The dominant characteristics of scientific discipline is grammatocentrism and Calculability, of which, the essence of grammatocentrism is theory centrism; While Calculability points to simply quantifying evaluation criterion. The result of scientific discipline is that humanism subject oriented university educational structure collapses, and replaced by disciplinarity which regards discipline classification as basic model, the new discipline research and talents cultivation pattern have become fundamental education system of modern university rapidly. Dominated Natural science disciplines, in reverse, humanities which born earlier and applied discipline which entered university in later time. Consequently, from the late18th century on, current educational system is constructed under above science disciplinarity.After science discipline controls production and dissemination of knowledge, engineering knowledge gradually entered university in the second half of19th century, enables experiential and practical higher engineering research and education to gain legal status in university with the help of science disciplinarity. Due to the needs of social reality development, engineering education enters into higher education field, but different countries’education traditions result in different development paths. For instance, traditional universities in Germany and France persist in their "pure blood", and exclude practical knowledge; therefore, there have a series of new organizations of higher engineering education. While in America, running-school modes are various, and it opens independent engineering college in traditional comprehensive university in earlier time.Disciplinarity makes practical engineering knowledge obtain its own discipline organization, thus, makes engineering education scientific.characteristics of which contains below:in terms of curriculum structure design, it pays more attention to the proportion of math and natural science foundation knowledge; as for teaching procedure, it cares more about training students’ rational speculative thought, axiomatic、 mathematical academic discourse pattern; In the process of teaching evaluation, it emphasizes testing certain theoretical knowledge, the virtue of it is that it enables the individual construct complete and coherent theoretical knowledge system by accepting strict methodology training, and helps the individual be familiar with research methods with universal value, so as to build theoretical foundation and develop cognitive ability, and finally to improve the professional level of the individual. These fundamentally change the past "manual type" engineering education, which relies on experience and practice and thus improve education quality greatly.However, behind its success, it hides its inherent hidden contradictions. Theory-and-science-centered science education pattern is gradually became the unidimensional tool of pursuing efficiency, it blindly pursues certainty of knowledge thus simply quantifying and illegal de-contextualization restoring education model, the systematicness and integrity of engineering itself are also fragmented by department education model, the final result will be that more and more "One-Dimensional" people who is lack of innovative, practical, and comprehensive abilities are brought up then. The drawbacks of continuous self-enhancement discipline mechanism exposed completely when engineering subjects integrating and disintegrating, when multiple of interdisciplinary subjects and cross-cutting subjects coming out in50’s of20th century.Engineering education begins to examine itself, in this backdrop,"return to the essence of engineering practice","macro engineering", these education theories are proposed. The essential characteristics of engineering internally decide the characteristics of engineering education. As to engineering itself, it is a field rather than a discipline. However, if any knowledge form needs to obtain legal rights to be passed on and produced in university, it has to be a discipline form. Therefore, the breakthrough point of engineering education reform relies on breaking out an encirclement of science disciplinarity, and transforming from discipline-centered to discipline-based and interdisciplinary, from theory-centered to practice-centered.