Sustainable education for bridge engineers

This article examines the way we educate future bridge engineers from the perspective of sustainability. The term sustainability is used in its original sense, namely, a quality of a practice that can be continued long into the future because the benefits it creates outweigh its costs. The focus is on the relation between the way we educate future designers of bridges and the value created by the works they design. It is demonstrated that there are several significant flaws in the current curriculum, and recent efforts to inject more "design" into the curriculum are unlikely to bring about needed change. The article proposes incorporating specific elements of knowledge, skills, and values into the curriculum to increase its capacity to produce engineers who are competent and creative. The most important aspect of knowledge to be added to the curriculum is the knowledge obtained from the critical study of good completed bridges. The most important skills to be added are the use of drawing as a tool for enhancing creativity and the use of scientific principles as tools for validating new ideas. The most important values to be taught relate to the duty of the engineering profession to create value for society by designing every bridge to be an increment in a continual process of improvement on existing technology.