We're eating our seed-corn!

We're far enough away from pioneer times that many now don't understand "eating your seed-corn." In that difficult era, you'd grow as much as you could, knowing that it had to do two things: feed you all winter, and seed the fields in the spring for the next year's crop. If the crop had been poor or the winter long, you might be very hungry when you'd eaten the feed-corn and all you had left was the seed you needed for next year. But if you ate that, there wouldn't be a crop next year. Farmers then knew that no matter how hard the winter was, you couldn't eat your seed corn.

The crop that should matter to all of us is our young people -- the next generation, those who will provide not just the brawn (not much of that is needed these days) but the brains to invent and develop and produce the ideas and technology a competitive society needs -- if it wants to stay competitive.

When I started in the job-training/manpower-development field in the late '60s, it was accepted government policy to expand training opportunities when unemployment rose. How better to be sure of a trained workforce when the economy started growing again? And it made lots of sense to pay people a stipend to go to school rather than just hand out unemployment checks or welfare money (though there might still be a need for some of that). Either way, you put money in the hands of people who need it, but this way you got something back by investing in a future skilled workforce.

With all this in mind, I have been shocked to read almost daily about the state and local governments and the universities cutting back on education, laying off teachers, dropping courses, raising tuition, and generally making it harder for young people (and older ones too) to improve themselves.

And, ironically, by using hard economic times as an excuse for cutting back on education, government has made hard times harder by increasing the amount of unemployment. Penny-wise and pound-foolish!