Higher Education

The number of young people graduating from secondary schools and going on to post-secondary opportunities at Universities both at home and abroad has been rising steadily in Vanuatu with improvements to the formal education sector and increased scholarship opportunities. This means that more and more young people are not spending as much time on their ancestral lands, speaking their ancestral language, and learning about their identity in ways that also have an impact on their quality of life. Does higher education have to come at the expense of traditional knowledge and practice? The episode this week features a storyteller that found her education had prevented her from learning more about where she was from and, in fact, who she was. Luckily for her, she was able to recognize her deficiencies and has committed herself to learning about her own culture, realizing the benefits that it brings.