More to education than the classroom

Page 5

An open letter to Mr. Drew Hayden Taylor:

I very much enjoyed your parchment and grad cap column in the August 2002 Windspeaker.

Your point on not having formal education and how others treat you as somewhat less than a complete success appears in all societies. It is sad that your success is not recognized for what it is-years of working smart, hard and staying focused.

Perhaps the next time you meet someone who is overly pro-university you can remind them of this quote: "I have neither the luxury nor the encumbrance of higher education."

No, I don't know who said it. Yes, we all need to learn more than those who have gone before us in the formal education system. Yet not at the expense of the informal education our parents and communities have to offer. To do so is to lose touch with so much of our individual and collective heritage. We need a strong combination of both.

Lastly, perhaps those who are overly pro-formal education don't understand what real education is about. There are eight different types of intelligence, according to Dr. Howard Garner from Harvard University. We don't all learn them in a class room.

Dr. Garner tells us that they are; linguistic/speaking, music, logical/mathematical, spatial, body/kinesthetic, interpersonal/team, intra-personal/self-management and nature/understanding and thriving with nature.

So the next time you get the less than subtle "so you have no university" approach remind the person that most of us learn more out of a classroom than in one. Yes, in today's society we need more formal education than we used to. However, it's not how much you've got that counts. It's what you've accomplished and shared that counts!

M. Ballard

Toronto