1 5 Good Reasons for Engineering as THE Focus for Technology Education

In this paper I will seek to identify and explain the primary rationale for having the field of technology education to direct its focus on engineering. The basis of this proposal stems from a combination of observations that I have had over a 25 year career as a teacher/teacher educator of industrial arts/technology education and a broad based review of the critical literature in the field. It is hoped that educators within technology education will appreciate the value of this rationale and begin to reorganize their curricula to focus on engineering. I consider the publication of the Jackson Mill Industrial Arts Curriculum Theory document (Snyder and Hales, 1981) as the starting point of the modern era of technology education. Of course there were other significant contributions that helped to set the stag