Re: An American Engineer Makes The Case The Case For Educational Nationalism
John Derbyshire writes: Further to the theme of our not graduating enough good engineers, a different Radio Derb listener emailed in as follows, slightly edited.
Correcting our weak, decadent educational system is easy—end all student loans except to the hard sciences/engineering. Amazingly, you’ll have tons of American students lining up to be engineers. Plus, you get the added advantage of shrinking and perhaps eliminating the Cultural Marxist hideouts known as history, literature, most social science departments, and of course the “Studies” programs—all of which are funded by student tuition.
This is really not a radical idea. Liberal-arts colleges were founded in this country primarily for the purpose of educating clergy or promoting a religious sect—from congregationalist Harvard & Yale to the Lutheran liberal-arts colleges dotting the Midwest to all the Catholic institutions. It makes no sense to pay four years of tuition for mediocre students to read novels or histories that they’ll never peer into for the rest of their lives—or even to learn social-scientific regression analysis or economic modeling that they’ll never use again.
Plus, eliminating non-science student loans would be a move that would not be politically impossible. Most people in this country lack a college degree—and those that have liberal-arts degrees are often dubious about their value.
Of course, the liberal media people will scream. They do have liberal-arts degrees, so obviously those degrees are of great value … to them.
I think a majority of Americans would reject their claims. To take a Mencken-ish view of things: No-one has ever lost money betting on American bad taste and anti-intellectualism.
Sounds reasonable to me. And these listener emails remind me that it's time once again to do public penance for my young-adult snobbery towards engineers. Should you encounter a person as ignorant as the undergraduate Derb in this regard, a good reading list to suggest would start with:
Your counterparty will then be well embarked on a path to the engineer-respecting wisdom of the mature Derb.
I think a majority of Americans would reject their claims. To take 
