A fine line between education and sheep-herding

By By Buddy Bynum / editor
Jan. 26, 2003
The Mississippi Legislature acted with unusual dispatch last week when both houses approved additional funding for education across the board, kindergarten through graduate school.
While differences remain to be worked out between House and Senate versions, maybe this is a good sign that legislators are hearing the desperate message that education is absolutely essential to better jobs and a higher quality of life for Mississippians.
Among people involved in higher education, Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat is leading the charge. But he is by no means alone. Any number of other voices have been trying for years to get the message to Mississippi's legislators that cutting education budgets is no way to secure the future.
The old clich "cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind. Or, sacrificing the future for short term finances.
The difference in the 2003 legislative session so far seems to be that legislators are really listening to the voices of experts who say budget cuts are crippling the capacity of the system to deliver high quality education. In some ways, it's an institutional failure.
More than pay hikes
The problem is more than pay hikes for K-12 teachers, who are already benefiting from increased salaries. They're in the third year of a five year commitment to raise salaries to the Southeastern average. Or, at least to the Southeastern average as it now exists.
Strangely, in the byzantine world of education funding, higher teacher pay sometimes comes at the expense of books and mortar as local school districts find themselves hard-pressed to meet the legislatively mandated raises. I hope they'll work that out.
Add to the equation the fact that experienced professors at institutions of higher learning and community colleges are leaving Mississippi in dangerous numbers, seeking higher pay elsewhere. This sad fact represents a brain drain that cannot be productive to the state of education over the long term. I hope that gets resolved, too.
One of the key legislative leaders in the move to provide more money for education in a season of tight budgets is Rep. Billy McCoy. A Democrat who has represented Alcorn and Prentiss counties in the Legislature since 1980, McCoy is chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and the frontrunner to succeed retiring House Speaker Tim Ford.
Intent on the mission
McCoy has charged Khayat and a small group of educators to come up with a formal plan that directly links education to economic development and quality of life. While such a link has long been known, it has never been formalized into a real working program.
McCoy seems intent on the mission. And, more to the point, he has pledged to Khayat and others that the Legislature will fund the plan.
That's an important consideration in a state that is still grappling with what it wants our young people to be when they grow up.
There are some who will continue to ask just how much the state can do in educating students when, ultimately, the students themselves have to show a keen interest in bettering their own lives.
Like writer Ezra Pound said in the "ABC of Reading" in 1934, "Real education must ultimately be limited to one who insists on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."
What an outstanding state and local funded system can do is stimulate as many students as possible into developing the habits that lead to the desire to learn over an entire lifetime. Learning should be a never-ending journey.
As they make key decisions this year that will guide the molding of young minds in the decades ahead, lawmakers might also remember the words of H.G. Wells, the father of modern science fiction whose masterful work "Outline of History" was published in 1920: