Subhotosh, my friend, I must respectfully disagree in two respects.
The idea that our children are so woefully educated is because of incompetent parents rather than because of incompetent teachers is profoundly wrong. Undoubtedly there are bad parents, parents who neglect or mistreat their children, but such parents are rare. Few parents do not try their best to care for their children. A parent should ensure that a child gets enough to eat, but that does not mean that every parent should be a farmer. We do not blame the parents if the gas main breaks and the children are cold; instead, we expect the gas company to get experts out in the cold who can fix the break without blowing up the neighborhood. The difference between the gas company's employees and school teachers is that gas explosions are very rare but the number of woefully educated students is in the millions.
Many parents do not have the mental capacity to solve problems such as you have posed: should we forcibly sterilize such people on the grounds that they lack the competence to be an engineer. Many more parents do not have the education even to begin to attack such a problem. Perhaps we should fine them for spawning offspring when they are so benighted.
We require parents to educate their children by sending them to school. It is not the parents' fault that the schools are staffed by half-wits and administered by quarter-wits.
Second, I believe engineers are under-appreciated, often to a shocking degree. The people who dominate our national communications, the media, the lawyers, and a large portion of the entertainment industry, are skilled with words and with appeals to emotion. We would still be living in caves if only such people existed. So it is not surprising that engineers are frequently defensive. But to decide that the "inventors" of society are a technological elite is going way too far.
EDIT: Actually, it is partially the parents' fault that the schools are so bad. If I were the parent of a public school student, I'd be inciting people to riot. People should not be so naive as to believe that the public school system is anything more than an intellectual Ponzi scheme.