A 1959 Comment on Engineering Education

[NNadir]

“Among the young engineers we interview we find few who have received thorough training in engineering fundamentals or principles, but most have absorbed quantities of facts — much easier to learn than principles but of little use without application of principles. Once a principle has been acquired it becomes a part of one and is never lost. It can be applied to novel problems and does not become obsolete as do all facts in a changing society. American education in general emphasizes learning factual know-how at the cost of absorbing fundamental principles, just as it stresses conditioning of behavior at the cost of developing the ability to think independently. Most of our schools have lost sight of the fact that a well-trained mind can cope with many unforeseen problems. Instead, they try to foresee every possible future difficulty a young person may encounter and then give a special course in how to deal with it. This is a hopeless endeavor, for in a rapidly changing world no one can foresee what future problems will have to be met...”

Hyman Rickover, Education and Freedom, 1959

It's possible we do better now, on the other hand, the engineers of the 1960's through the year say, 1990, did remarkable things.