I suggest replacing engineering design with art. It is practicle and requires both creative thinking and problem solving.

Ignore the arts and you end up with students who are concommitantly weak in mathematics and sciences.

Drop music programs and you have weaker mathematics and math-related skills across the board.

Bring back full music and arts programs in primary, middle and secondary schools!

Arts are great but math and science are more important to survival.  Arts impove quality of life, but don't help us make food, medicine, technology ect.  They are right to be the first to go.  Mandating that they come back is not the way to responsibly get them back.  Improving a school to the point that it can afford the arts on its own is the onl way to go.

Modern Artist's Confession

I myself am an artist.  I paint and draw, but my original desire to create, explore through observation and understand the world on my own terms has also endowed me with the great desire for that which is beautiful and empirical.  Since my path of artistic discovery originally began is has also opened my eyes to literature, history, science, technology, music and math.  But one of the most important things that it has taught me is the desire to constantly remain aware of every detail as well as the big picture.  I believe that this is a philosophy that is lacking in a modern world that finds itself so torn by the fact that it is whole and yet so separate.