Guest editorial: The context of engineering education

Education has as its latin root the verb educo which means to lead out, to lead out of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, to nurture a person´s capacity for independent judgment within a sound perspective upon the human condition as it is, as it has come to be, and as it may become. Education is therefore concerned not just with the discovery, assessment, preservation and transmission of knowledge but with the encouragement and development of talent that leads through experience to wisdom. Northrop Frye has said that knowledge is knowledge of something: wisdom is a sense of the potential rather than the actual, a practical knowledge ready to meet whatever eventualities may occur in an uncertain future.