Responses - The Final Four Of Learning

Below is an excellent response from the Historian re the original subject message that pertained to the status of education in America.

In this regard our South Carolina businessman questioned the pracitcality & cost-benefit of a liberal arts education (& so do I) when he wrote "I guess this is fine if all you are looking for in college is a general liberal arts curriculum. And you have a boat load of money to pour into it."

Yes, it is true that ACTA concentrates on liberal arts topics & that is why my work is limited with them. Students today are pouring a boat load of money "into it" but are not learning anything - especially of value. I do think that it is important for students, regardless of their major, to know our history, literature, & basic economics not to mention that so many schools don't require any math or science @ all whether they are Arts & Science majors or not. These basic flaws spill over into engineering curriculums as well. In 2007 I attended an ACTA two day conference in Mt. Vernon & a speaker from the Chamber of Commerce answered my specific question about engineering by saying that too many of our graduates are woeful in this area also. He gave examples of jobs that were not being filled by our engineering grads that he specifically knew of.

I can talk to some engineering grads who are on the Dean's List for five minutes & know that they don't know engineering & furthermore can't write a coherent memo let alone a technical report. I saw this regularly as an employer in my firm that built chemical plants all over the world. The best engineers that worked for me were technicians that I taught engineering to as well as how to write contracts & minutes of meetings that had some power to them. The grads had trouble with both of these areas.

The Chairman Emeritus of ACTA is Lynne Cheney. That is what sparked my interest in this firm to begin with. ACTA is doing a first class job for America as are the other higher education firms Carol & I work with.

---Response From The Historian---

How times have changed. In my generation parents wanted their children to go to college for a good education. Today they send them to college for sports and money they can earn playing sports after graduation.

Why bother to learn? - play football (college pays your expenses) and you live a good life. If the college has a good team they receive large donations from corporations to help with expenses.

Call it luck, but if it wasn't for people like Lise Meitner, unappreciated female mathematical physicist, who did testing and experiments regarding nuclear fission our progress would have been appreciably slowed from what it was and is. She lived in Germany and Hitler did not have faith in people who had brains. She knew her number would be coming up for death - somehow escaped to America.

People like Albert Einstein, developer of theory of relativity, also somehow got out of Germany.

In 1939, he and other scientists wrote FDR a letter saying if an atomic bomb could be developed it would save lives in a war. Because of this letter FDR authorized the "Manhattan Project" that developed the atomic bomb during World War II under the command of Lieutenant General Leslie Groves JR. Einstein was not involved in the project. The rest is history. BTW, letter to FDR mentioned Germany was also conducting studies and experiments on nuclear weapons.

Remember, brains win out all the time for major projects - not sports.