Don't Eat Our Seed Corn

Folks who didn't grow up on a farm may not get the allusion to seed corn. Let me explain.

Back in the olden days (before hybrid seeds and genetic engineering), farmers harvested their crops and set aside some of the harvest to use as seeds for the following year's planting. Even in hard times, they would never eat the grain set aside as seed. If they ate the seed corn, it would extend and intensify the famine into the next year.

Something like that is going on in Raleigh this year as the state legislature is pushing drastic cuts in education programs, layoffs of teachers and diversion of public school resources to charter schools and even private schools. That may even be worse than eating seed corn, because the effects may last for a lifetime of the students affected.

"Why should I care?" you may ask, "I have no children in school."

Such an attitude would be foolish in the extreme. All children in school are our children. They are the ones whose contributions to Social Security taxes and Medicare funds will be used to support us in our old age. Even for those who don't need Social Security to survive, retirement plans depend on future productivity increasing the value of factories and enterprises and expanding our national wealth and the value of our stocks and bonds. Who will labor to cause that increase?

These very schoolchildren.

One of the most pernicious ideas abroad in the land is that children and their parents are "customers" of our schools and that the school systems must compete for their favor. The truth is that we are all recipients of the value provided by effective school systems.

Good schools attract intelligent and capable parents to come here. They attract businesses to our state. Schools are a valuable economic multiplier. We let them languish at our collective peril.

Let's make our schools even better, instead of starving them for resources.