When at university one is taught about the “hidden curriculum”, the stuff that goes on outside the lecture room: meeting people from different backgrounds, living in a new location, for some a different country, etc, etc.
This is the other side of the education one is getting at university, to broaden one’s horizon beyond the subject being taught.
Is this simple process of learning beyond what is says on the tin still valid? Is the hidden curriculum being discarded in this day of Google searches and clicks and likes on social media?
Ask any graduate of naval architecture a question they are unfamiliar with, and more often than not, one will see them whipping out their phone and doing a quick Google search, or at their PC if in the office. Just like AI, this is outsourcing one’s research and learning to a third party. Nothing is learnt nor gained in this process. The young master has acquiesced their knowledge base to being the slave for their entire career with no learnt memory recall other than which buttons to press on their smartphone.
The notation that 10 years of hard-learnt experience can be acquired in a quick 10-second search is becoming the norm. Impatience rules the day, speed is king and taking time is for fools or those with no ambition. Everyone wants to be an instant subject matter expert without taking the time to earn that badge of honour bestowed on them by their peers.
The computer, for all its wonders (and there is plenty to marvel and wonder at) in the 21ct century, is becoming its own worst enemy. By that, I refer to the software that is used on these ever more powerful PCs.
While I was still a young naval architect, one of my earliest tasks was to go around the shipyard with a 20kg spring balance and to weigh “things”. This meant anything I could see being made or laying around on the shopfloor that was destined to end up on one of the many boats in build at the yard. I made a list that eventually become a small book of endless items that I had weighed. This also included weighing major bits of fabrication when lifted or being turned, as well as major machinery. This, however, went on for not just weeks, but many months.
Month after month walking around the yard weighing things. “Is this naval architecture?” I thought. “What am I doing? I want to design. I want to become a naval architect, not someone walking around with a spring balance and being abused and ridiculed by those on the shopfloor.”
Looking back, I realise such abuse would never be tolerated in today’s world of being light and of fluffy “feelings”. However, I persisted.
The journey of reading the rules, knowing which rule meant what, was liberating.
Sometime after, the chief designer gave me a specification and a large A0 printed general arrangement of a new tender the company was bidding for at that time. My task was to estimate the weight of the boat. I had zero knowledge of such things, and there was no smartphone to ask. In fact, there was just one PC in the whole company for doing stability calculations. How could I do this?
After sitting down to read the spec and looking at the GA, I realised that a number of items looked familiar. Fire monitors? Wait, I weighed one of those two months ago. Windows in the deckhouse? A yes, I weighed those last week. And so on it went.
After what must have seemed like ages for the chief designer as he waited for my weight breakdown, I completed my first ever weight estimate for a whole boat. This was one of the if not the most important lesson I learnt as a young graduate naval architect. The journey to the knowledge, the time spent “doing”, was far, far greater than the end result.
Had there been Google and smartphones at that time, a 10-second search for “similar” types of vessels for a displacement would have taken just 10 seconds. But what would I have learnt? Nothing.
The same story occurred when I was presented with a midship section shape of the vessel from the lines plan and was asked to do the structure for the boat. Reading the rule book and performing all the calculations by hand took forever, but the more I did this, the quicker it became and I learnt the rules, simply because I had to read them to understand what the coefficient for “X” was or the support girth, etc.
Again, the journey of reading the rules, knowing which rule meant what, and later being able to contradict a tricky and cantankerous surveyor – noting that his instruction was wrong because I had just read the rules on the very item being questioned – was liberating. It gave me a sense of confidence backed up by the knowledge learnt along the journey to a simple midship section calculation.
Today, thumb through a magazine (if you still can) or any social media post where there are many posts by individuals and companies all seeking to gain an edge, an advantage, an impression of “knowing things”, and knowing them very quickly! We see eye-catching posts along the lines of “Be able to draw a lines plan within seconds, and then, in just a few more seconds, you can create the entire structure and weight estimate.” What’s not to like? I spent about 10 years learning all that. Why wouldn’t I want a programme that gives me all this information in seconds?
The journey, the time spent learning and acquiring knowledge far beyond the task at hand, is the real currency.
So, let’s go to the lines plan. Does it take into consideration the often limited facilities and infrastructure within a yard that hampers the ability to form plates into certain shapes, and as such, the hull lines? It may not look super sexy, but it is easy and quicker to fabricate with no complex curves or kinks.
Using simple, well-defined pre-set shapes that are easy to roll and where an expert fabricator can see the lines of the strain hardening on the plate created by the mill during the hardening process and thus roll with the grain not against it and as such influence the final hull shape that is better to fabricate and thus having a much longer life span? This is not a 10-second job.
What about the structure? Does it take into consideration the access for the welder, or the lines that create plates that end up all butting together at an apex leaving three or, at worst, four welds coming together at in one location? You end up building in stress concentrations in the frame, owing to odd shapes, simply because it saves weight. You end up having the bottom frames significantly stiffer than the side frames because, again, the rules allow such a large reduction owing to the near-vertical nature of the side frame to the horizontal waterline. It saves weight! You have longitudinals so close to main structure the welder cannot get the gun inside to perform a decent full pen weld.
The more one learns, the one realises how much there is still to learn. Being presented with shortcuts only serves those that wish to promote such software as “savings” whilst growing their bank balance. Being able to create lines, structure, and weights within seconds is far too good an opportunity to ignore.
And yet the hidden curriculum of learning things on a daily basis to get to the point of realising speed is not the “tool” of the naval architect. The journey, the time spent learning and acquiring knowledge far beyond the task at hand, is the real currency. Software, no matter how powerful and alluring, is nothing more than a tool.
One cannot force 10 years to become 10 seconds simply because tools exist that can do this “task”. It is the realisation that 10 years’ knowledge and experience take 10 years to learn. This is, of course, unless the next generation of naval architects are so eager and keen to become instant experts that they become the slave, not the master, and outsource everything to a third party that is ever-changing based upon what it is fed into its algorithm.