Engineering education in sustainable development: sustainability as a tool to open up the windows of engineering institutions

Engineering faces a crisis throughout Western society. The number of engineering students is dropping considerably. The prestige of technology and engineering has dropped simultaneously. In the 1950s, nobody doubted the role of technology as the engine of progress, but the demystification of technology in the 1970s focused around various controversies, like that of nuclear energy, and criticism gave rise to changes. However, mainstream engineering was generally not affected. Sustainability was initially regarded by many engineers as a new attack, as various accepted cleaning technologies (such as sewerage clearing or filtering) were often criticized as ‘end of pipe’. Gradually, the message that sustainable development (SD) is a challenge and not a burden for the engineering community has grown. Integrating SD cannot be achieved just by putting a social science course into an engineering curriculum: the cultural divide is too large to be bridged in this way. This article will analyse recent changes that have taken place in two technical universities, and will offer some guidelines for successful implementation of SD in engineering curricula.