How relevant is Traditional Education for an Architect?

There was a big debate about the quality of education in Uganda today, following the recently released national examinations.  As results from each of the three different tiers of our formal education were released, the decibels from this debate went a notch higher.  I don’t intend to reignite that debate here.  What was very clear to me is that there seemed to be some consensus that our quality of education had deteriorated over the years.  A friend of mine ingenuously said that the quality of a graduate from Uganda’s education system gets poorer, the younger they are.  Surely this can’t be true, I argued, but I had no evidence to prop up my disagreement.  This is when I decided to examine the field that I am more conversant with.  Once or twice over my 25-year career, some clients have had the audacity to tell me that we college graduates are useless because ‘we can’t build things’ or that those we call technicians/draftsmen actually do a better job in design than the majority of us with a college degree.  On the other hand, I have learnt that there some fresh architecture graduates from the two leading universities in Uganda who have made it very clear that they don’t need to be examined about their experience in construction (and eventually get registered) because they got enough knowledge and design skills from school. 

I asked myself, is a bachelor’s degree all you need to work perfectly in construction or is it really necessary to have one at all?  I am sure many of my readers will have encountered builders who claim to have put up some of Kampala’s magnificent buildings and homes, but at the same time these lovely people do not seem not be able to tell the difference between feet and metres or if they do, they will insist that as a standard the ring beam should always be 7 feet high.    These are builders who either started in the business by recommendation when they were younger, people who had to work early and support themselves or their families as porters on sites or just have generally been around and working in the industry for yso long.  There are street-smart people.  They do not have a college degree or diploma in construction but they know their ways around putting up a building.  Some clients argue that we college graduates do not get the time in school to experience "real life construction” and as soon as we are in the field, we are bosses backing orders.  That these are the real people who matter, the ones who know how it is done.  That college graduates have no experience of ‘how’ it is done.  My argument has been that we may not know the full ‘how’ (we know some of it) but we fully know and understand the ‘why’, which unfortunately our colleagues are not equipped with.

There are 2 sides (or, rather, 2 levels of depth) of what is commonly referred to as "knowledge" in construction or most professional fields that are science based.  Firstly, it is important to know how things are done, but even more important one needs to understand why they are done the way they are done and not any other way, and what may happen if one tries to do it differently.  The ‘why’ is the theory and the science behind the way things are done.
 A builder or technician (especially a smart one), does not need to know why things are done the way they are done as long as they can give a properly finished product.  Experience will always afford you the knowledge and perfection of things – the ‘how’ and this in many situations is enough. If you keep doing things the way you have always done them for the last 20 years what can go wrong?  Probably nothing until you find yourself in the situation that you have never been before - and in this case your experience becomes useless, what you need is the knowledge of the science behind the processes that you have been working with all along so that so that you can analyze the situation and come up with the correct solution.  Make a wrong decision and your product will no longer be perfect and this is where you need education, and to a certain level.  It is true that a bachelor's degree is not the measure of one's brain efficiency, and there is no proof that it has ever added gray matter to anyone's brain. A good quality education helps you to recognize situations and come up with solutions because of your knowledge of the ‘why’.  There are times I have been faced with situations in my job and then remember that if I use the Pythagoras theorem or tangent of an angle, I can actually get the missing dimension on a drawing. Can one achieve the same without actually attending school - sure, you can, and some do however, the likelihood of somebody without formal education or having learned as much as someone with the degree to be able to come up with solutions for problems they have never encountered is very low, which is why employers understand the value of a good degree.



Going back to the experience - of course, a college degree does not replace experience and having one without the experience is also useless. One still needs to get his / her boots and hands dirty in order to become a well-rounded professional. The degree just helps explain the ‘why’, help you extrapolate the knowledge gained in class and apply it in a real life situation. This helps you make the correct decision in that situation as well.  Just as I believe that all architects should spend at least two years in the field to see first hand what is involved in a real working project, and not a project at a desk or in a classroom, I believe that builders and/or technicians without the relevant education are not fit to build or design buildings on their own without supervision.