This might come across as a very strange question but is it uncommon to find engineers who did not enjoy school or think highly of the schools that they attended? I have encountered numerous computing and IT types over the years who did not enjoy school or had bad experiences at school but very few electrical or mechanical engineers.
I'm (very deliberately!) not commenting about home education. For everything I wrote about above and which follows please read my points as relating to effective or ineffective learning in a school environment, I apologise if that was not clear. I've not had enough experience with home education to comment, so I don't.
When I said " 'survival skills', which aren't going to be learnt at home" (relating to a school educated child) I was specifically thinking about two things: coping in an institutional environment, and coping in a social environment with a range of people with different - sometimes very different - beliefs, ideas, and backgrounds to your own. Now sometimes, perhaps very often, learning of one or the other of these doesn't happen in a school environment, or - as I suggest above - happens in a way which leads to behaviours and attitudes which could be considered unhelpful either to the person or to the organisation they end up working in. But either way, back to the original point, I believe these are highly transferable to the work environment for good or ill.
Regarding which social skills are essential to an effective engineering team (although not necessarily to all individual engineers within that team), I would start the list with effective communication (speaking, writing and - most of all - listening), appreciation of others expertise and correct positioning of your expertise with theirs, sensitivity to others circumstances - including the fact that these may change year-by-year, day-by-day, and sometimes hour-by-hour, willingness to admit mistakes, willingness to accept others mistakes, mutual respect, assertiveness (there's huge amounts underneath this one - but lots about it around), empathy (ditto). I'm sure others could add to the list.
The vast majority of engineering is about teamwork, and all engineering is to deliver a product or service to a customer (even if they are another engineer!). My frustration with many schools is that they have the idea that all engineers sit in little isolated boxes, receiving instructions from somewhere on high, which they then implement without discussion and post the product out to a customer they never see. Maybe some engineers do work like that - I'm very glad I never have. Now within in an engineering team it is perfectly possible to have engineers who are excellent at their technical subject but are unable to communicate that effectively (for whatever reason) to the wider organisation or to customers etc. However the engineering team as a whole must be able to communicate effectively within itself and the (internal or external) customers, and that only works if some members of the team have those skills listed above.
In my time as an engineering manager I've had to stop engineers hitting each other, work out what to do when two engineers on a project won't talk to each other, work out what to do when one engineer wants to sit next to another but they in turn don't want to sit next to them, engineers who refuse to let anyone else see their work etc etc etc - and listening again and again to the cry of "it's not fair!". Which is why it is very interesting when you see what behaviours a good primary school is trying to encourage! Now some people would (and do) disagree with me, but personally - based on my involvement over very many years in both very successful and very unsuccessful projects - my experience is that a team which I would describe as "socially functional" (i.e. who respect each other and communicate well with each other and the outside environment) will produce a much more successful outcome (by any standard of measurement) than a team of highly technical competent engineers who - well - aren't.
I believe this is one of the biggest issues in 21st century engineering, there's enough underlying those brief paragraphs to fill a book. A couple of years ago I did a personal review of the current literature on engineering management where I found huge amounts about project management, time resource and cost planning and tracking, quality management, a bit on employment law, but hardly anything about bringing together a roomful of personalities - often in a highly stressful environment - and getting them to work effectively together. Which is actually what I found myself spending most of my 17 years as a manager doing. And it really really helps you as a manager if a few people on the team are naturally good at this stuff - or have learnt in childhood (back to the thread) to be good at this stuff.
I'm (very deliberately!) not commenting about home education. For everything I wrote about above and which follows please read my points as relating to effective or ineffective learning in a school environment, I apologise if that was not clear. I've not had enough experience with home education to comment, so I don't.
When I said " 'survival skills', which aren't going to be learnt at home" (relating to a school educated child) I was specifically thinking about two things: coping in an institutional environment, and coping in a social environment with a range of people with different - sometimes very different - beliefs, ideas, and backgrounds to your own. Now sometimes, perhaps very often, learning of one or the other of these doesn't happen in a school environment, or - as I suggest above - happens in a way which leads to behaviours and attitudes which could be considered unhelpful either to the person or to the organisation they end up working in. But either way, back to the original point, I believe these are highly transferable to the work environment for good or ill.
Regarding which social skills are essential to an effective engineering team (although not necessarily to all individual engineers within that team), I would start the list with effective communication (speaking, writing and - most of all - listening), appreciation of others expertise and correct positioning of your expertise with theirs, sensitivity to others circumstances - including the fact that these may change year-by-year, day-by-day, and sometimes hour-by-hour, willingness to admit mistakes, willingness to accept others mistakes, mutual respect, assertiveness (there's huge amounts underneath this one - but lots about it around), empathy (ditto). I'm sure others could add to the list.
The vast majority of engineering is about teamwork, and all engineering is to deliver a product or service to a customer (even if they are another engineer!). My frustration with many schools is that they have the idea that all engineers sit in little isolated boxes, receiving instructions from somewhere on high, which they then implement without discussion and post the product out to a customer they never see. Maybe some engineers do work like that - I'm very glad I never have. Now within in an engineering team it is perfectly possible to have engineers who are excellent at their technical subject but are unable to communicate that effectively (for whatever reason) to the wider organisation or to customers etc. However the engineering team as a whole must be able to communicate effectively within itself and the (internal or external) customers, and that only works if some members of the team have those skills listed above.
In my time as an engineering manager I've had to stop engineers hitting each other, work out what to do when two engineers on a project won't talk to each other, work out what to do when one engineer wants to sit next to another but they in turn don't want to sit next to them, engineers who refuse to let anyone else see their work etc etc etc - and listening again and again to the cry of "it's not fair!". Which is why it is very interesting when you see what behaviours a good primary school is trying to encourage! Now some people would (and do) disagree with me, but personally - based on my involvement over very many years in both very successful and very unsuccessful projects - my experience is that a team which I would describe as "socially functional" (i.e. who respect each other and communicate well with each other and the outside environment) will produce a much more successful outcome (by any standard of measurement) than a team of highly technical competent engineers who - well - aren't.
I believe this is one of the biggest issues in 21st century engineering, there's enough underlying those brief paragraphs to fill a book. A couple of years ago I did a personal review of the current literature on engineering management where I found huge amounts about project management, time resource and cost planning and tracking, quality management, a bit on employment law, but hardly anything about bringing together a roomful of personalities - often in a highly stressful environment - and getting them to work effectively together. Which is actually what I found myself spending most of my 17 years as a manager doing. And it really really helps you as a manager if a few people on the team are naturally good at this stuff - or have learnt in childhood (back to the thread) to be good at this stuff.
