Minnesota's future: The way there? Stop living in the past.

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. (To contribute, click here.) This article is a response to Star Tribune Opinion's June 4 call for submissions on the question: "Where does Minnesota go from here?" Read the full collection of responses here.

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Responses to Star Tribune Opinion's call for submissions on the question "Where does Minnesota go from here?" have been, to use a Minnesota-appropriate term, interesting. One column, from a native of Yemen, wants to do away with the cold. Another hopes we'd all love each other.

Good luck with either of those.

I suggest something we actually can do: Stop living in the past.

History is important, and one of the most important things it teaches is that things change; systems, habits, beliefs run into evidence that they never really worked or, if they did, don't work anymore. History also teaches that we respond to such evidence-based epiphanies by doing all we can to deny what stands right in front of us. We dither and delay, in every imaginable way trying to avoid admitting the obvious. And then, finally, beaten by an adversary we claim to value — rationality — we cry or curse and go on with our lives. The new realities wear us down with their inescapability.

While we're running from reality, we prolong the bleeding; in trying to deny our problems, whatever they are, we make them worse by waiting as long as we can to deal with the world as it is. This happens whether you're a homeowner ignoring a roof leak or a policymaker who wants one last crack at propping up what's falling down around us.

This happens in lots of situations and sectors. One on my mind at the moment is education. The public schools here in Winona have about half as many students as they once did. Two 1930s-era elementary schools (one with an appraised value of $2.1 million) are getting $26 million in construction for geothermal systems. The school board put the first $16 million on the tax rolls without voter approval and, when bids came in much higher than anticipated, plunged ahead anyway, not knowing where the remaining $10 million will come from — even though the school district's own analysis predicts its buildings by 2032 will have more empty seats than it has elementary, middle-school or high-school students. That $26 million is just for geothermal — not a nickel for other deferred maintenance.

Winona needed those schools when families commonly had four, five, six kids; those days are long gone. With no plan for dealing with plunging enrollment, the school board is saying, in effect: Demography be damned; something will work out.

Something similar is happening in the Minnesota State system. Seven four-year colleges and 26 two-year colleges was a great idea that worked for decades — but it no longer does, as evidenced by a systemwide financial crisis brought on by the same enrollment drops plaguing public schools throughout the nation. St. Cloud State's plight has gotten the most recent attention, but the entire Minnesota State system is struggling due to the dearth of students. And still we hear calls to keep things as they are — keep the buildings, keep programs that have single-digit enrollments — without any explanation of how yesterday's plans can work in today's conditions.

I'm a retired university faculty member whose education began in a small rural school district where I got a bare-bones but solid education (two electives in 12 years, if I remember right). The systems that served me so well, that I was so lucky to be part of, are dear to me; more so than anything other than wonderful parents and a jewel of a wife as my life partner, those systems are why I've had a very good life. But those systems no longer work, and the longer we refuse to act on that fact, the longer we deprive today's students of the great gifts many like me received. Ceasing to live in the past does not mean ceasing to value it. It means adjusting systems to new demographic realities so those systems work as well for future generations as the current, outdated systems did for so long. It means honoring the past by charting a course based not on what the world once was, but on the world as it is and it will be in years to come.

Steve Schild, of Winona, Minn., is an emeritus professor of communication.