What horseshit...

"As computers have grown more powerful, humans are no longer needed to crunch the numbers. Instead the role of people is to work out which mathematical model approximates best to a real life situation – whether that is the fastest way to deliver Christmas shopping, or organising relief in a disaster zone."

Because our forebears were such inept dummies. I guess I'm the last person left on the planet who realizes that modern generations are increasingly dumber and less able to think critically than earlier ones.

"'A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy. "
- H.G. Wells, "The Time Machine"
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/35/p...

"And all those people knew was that to do a certain thing to a certain lever produced certain results. Just as men in the Middle Ages knew that to take a certain material, wood, and place it in contact with other pieces of wood heated red, would cause the wood to disappear, and become heat. They did not understand that wood was being oxidized with the release of the heat of formation of carbon dioxide and water. So those people did not understand the things that fed and clothed and carried them."
- John W. Campbell (as Don A. Stuart) "Twilight"
http://naderlibrary.com/eiseley.twilight...

And the most damning off all, "The Machine Stops", by E.M. Forster
http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlic...

Long ago I read an article, now lost to a hard drive crash, about "The German School", which was a philosophy of education that came out in the late 19th century, wherein education was viewed not as an end itself, but as preparation for employment. Education was to be functional, teaching and preparing a person for his likely job duties as an adult. Not for education itself.

Yet that article pretends that the purpose of an education is to provide employees for high-tech companies, to prepare students for whatever roles are needed by said companies.

"“Why did Van Buren fail of re-election? How do you extract the cube root of eighty-seven?”

Van Buren had been a president; that was all I remembered. But I could answer the other one. “If you want a cube root, you look in a table in the back of the book.”

Dad sighed. “Kip, do you think that table was brought down from on high by an archangel?”"
- Robert A. Heinlein, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel"