What I meant was that the needs of industrialization changed the nature of education. History, philosophy, ancient languages, literature, and a well-rounded education became less important. The new world needed engineers, technicians, experts in commerce and law. Learning for learning's sake became less important, now knowledge was harnessed to service the infrastructure of business and manufacture.

Instead of preserving the knowledge of the past, the new man was to be engaged in creating new knowledge. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the emphasis changes.

One of the founding fathers once said (I quote from memory, so I may not have it exactly right):

"I study politics and war so my children can study commerce and husbandry, and their children can study art and science".

But as it turns out, you don't need Latin to do international trade. You need English. And you don't need to be a mathematician to use a computer, or know how to write effectively to work a word processor. The process continues today.

In my own profession, automated cartography, many of the computational skills I was expected to know are now done in software, to make maps today you need to program in scripts, understand databases, master user interfaces. You don't need to know squat about the mathematics of map projections or spherical trigonometry. When I started, a bit of college physics and math was all you needed to work in "High tech". Those skills are still needed, but only by a few upper level designers at the PhD level. Operating a workstation is what technicians do any more.

I used to be able to start a new job and I was confident I had the general STEM background to easily pick up the specific skills I might need. If my boss knew I had a background in air photo or remote sensing or computer graphics he knew I could easily learn Geographic Information Systems from scratch. Nowadays, they expect you to know ArcView 9.2, and I have to compete with college kids who have MS degrees in GIS but don't know the difference between latitude and longitude.

I'm lucky I was able to retire when I did, most of what I know how to do is either obsolete or it's all done by the software now. If I ever have to go back to work, I'm going for a job in something totally different from tech, like sales; the skills I've spent a lifetime mastering are no longer that important. I get the same reports from my colleagues...their skills are totally useless, all they can do any more is management, and those positions are now starting to get scarce.

We have professional managers now, they don't know any particular industry or business, but they are trained in the science and principles of management. God help us all.