Annual General Assembly 2003 - Alexandria

Session 1 WG1

A Perspective of Seafarers Training

Professor David F. Sears

California Maritime Academy
A Campus of the California State University
200 Maritime Academy Drive
Vallejo, California 94590 - USA
E-mail: *dsears@csum.edu.us

ABSTRACT

A university graduate is generally believed to be a well rounded person, with not only a strong understanding of the professional skills of their major course of study, but also a liberal education in humanities, social issues, history, etc. Many universities have periodic reviews of the curriculums of their majors, with the purpose of ensuring that the curriculum is relevant to the changing nature of the major. Without such a periodic review, medical universities would still be teaching the use of leeches, blood letting and other medieval period techniques and would not teach modern medical advances such as antisepsis, the diagnostic uses of MRI, etc.

As the breath of knowledge of a profession grows, there is a tendency to add material to the professional curriculum at the expense of the traditional liberal education. The new courses would be added without other changes or deletions of the existing curriculum. Such an approach can compromise the academic rigor by placing so much material into a finite length program that it cannot be covered in depth without reducing the rigor of the studies. The other alternative could be to keep the rigor in the professional subjects, but reduce the liberal university courses, either in number or quality. This approach, taken to an extreme, would result in a program that is all professional training, and not a university education. While this may be appropriate for a technical school, it is not appropriate for a university.

The appropriate approach to this periodic review is to realize that no subject is not to be considered for deletion and to start the review with a blank table on which will be laid the skills and knowledge required for the graduate.

This empty table approach is complicated for members of IAMU as a significant portion of the professional skills are specified, not by the university faculty, but by the STCW 95, and this Code is often viewed as untouchable. It is the view of the author that the Code also needs to be periodically reviewed and changed to reflect changes in the profession, and that such a review is an appropriate task of IAMU Working Group I.

In this paper the author will examine the STCW code knowledge, understanding and proficiency requirements for their relevancy to current sea going skill requirements, with a view to recommending the deletion of outdated requirements. It is recognized that some of these recommended deletions or changes will be controversial, but only through an open discussion by IAMU members will the curriculum of our universities provide our graduates with the skills and liberal education that they need.

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