Of course, education has always implied a preparation for the future. There is no compelling reason to believe that our 2,000th trip around the sun, marked from an arbitrary starting point, will be a watershed in human affairs. Nevertheless, we tend to compartmentalize time as well as space, and undeniably the move into another millennium tends to make one more reflective about our own small segment of activities. It is for these stresses that we educate our successors. We need not belabor the concept of occupational hygiene as a science.
Occupational hygiene is applied science, a profession, openly and triumphantly.
As such, it has been remarkably enhanced and extended by the revolution in technology in this past generation. Our main problem lies in the fact that we simply do not have answers to most of the major illnesses that prematurely kill or cripple, but fortunately it is our job to prevent, not to cure. However, the daily practice of occupational hygiene simulates the scientific method as hypotheses are formed and data are obtained and evaluated to support or to destroy them. No graduate program that does not teach its students how to learn from experience as well as before experience, how to observe and reason wisely and how to compare their work with what has been observed and thought elsewhere is worthy of the name. We must provide our students with current technology, but we must also provide an environment where they learn how to think and how to learn in a lifelong experience of practicing the profession.