Yet, this country is failing itself through lack of dedicated educators with the will to develop that potential. Natalia Afanasyeva has been a research professor in the Dept. of Physics at the Univ. She is a member of the SPIE Education Committee. That's the amount of time an average U.S. elementary schoolchild is taught science every week. Most of this time is spent on passive observation and some on abstract concepts, but little, if any, is spent on design, fabrication, and testing activities that form the bedrock of engineering practice and innovation.
Engineers enable civilization.
Culture is organic, an ever-evolving web of relationships. Being technical experts, engineers directly impact the former two. Being manipulators of mass and energy, engineers accomplish the latter. This has been so from the time humans first fashioned arrowheads. The inventors of the slingshot and the potter's wheel were engineers, and so were the mixers of colored clays and plant saps.