Public education BEGAN as social engineering, a hundred odd years ago, as a way of creating cultural and social uniformity in the multiethnic melting pot of our nation of immigrants.

In the mid-20th century, federal dollars transformed American science and technology education into a weapon in the Cold War w/the USSR; again, this is social engineering, an attempt to shape people for political purposes.

Fact is, America, the Constitution itself is an example of social engineering, an attempt to apply human reason to problems of governance and power that, before the Constitution were subject only to divine solutions.

Usually when I hear conservatives complain about how schools are social engineering they're complaining about how public schools reflect our always-multiethnic society when, apparently, they should, by conservative lights, reflect  . . . something else.

Segregation, now, THAT was "social engineering".