[sdiy] Can your *really* teach "Engineering"?

[David G. Dixon]

Alexander, I think you answered your own question:

> A while ago in human history you where an adult at 13. Kids of 15-16
> went to war.

Yes, and what a brilliant population control scheme it was, too!  Now that
we've suffered through several decades of relative peace in the western
world, we have all these damn kids to park in schools, mostly to keep them
away from the workplace, which mostly exists to give people something to do
who would otherwise just hang around and get themselves into trouble.

A very successful industrialist (president of a very successful steel
company, and perpetual occupant of Forbes magazine's top CEOs list year
after year) came to my university and gave a talk recently (his father
founded our department in 1936, and our building bears his father's name).
He told this joke:

"The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog.
The man's job will be to feed the dog, and the dog's job will be to prevent
the man from getting anywhere near the equipment."

The sad fact is, our modern world can run itself with just a tiny fraction
of the people currently employed.  Most people are being employed for the
sake of employment.  Kurt Vonnegut really had this problem nailed in his
prescient 1956 novel "Player Piano" -- I highly recommend it.

Finding a meaningful role in modern society is the major challenge facing
most of us today, and most of us are failing.