DEAR ANNE AND TRACY:

I am writing from my grandmother's house in a town of 400 due west of Winnipeg. For the past two days, we have been working on a quilt. The pattern is called "Tree Everlasting." I found it in a book on the history of quilting in Canada. Grandma had never seen this pattern before but she is impressed by the gaiety of the psychedelic materials I brought. Before we cut out the pieces, she showed me three of the quilts she has made over the years.

She pieced them together herself - the first when she was in her twenties - and all were quilted by groups of women in town. Tonight on the news there was coverage of an archaeological dig near Lockport. It has found evidence of Manitoba's first farmers, native people who lived there between 1200 and 1500 A.D. Apparently women brought their knowledge of farming when they married into the tribes from further south. Interesting that instead of this, the common idea of Canadian prairie farmers is the male homesteader who arrived early in the last century to tackle the untitled frontier...

So what does this have to do with women and literacy? Both quilting and farming are complex skills, yet they are learned without the aid of a text. They are shared among people regardless of their prior knowledge or their speed. They reminded me that non-formal ways of sharing knowledge have existed for many, many years.

My main experience with non-formal education has been my experiences of community-based literacy programs. I can't begin to describe how much I have learned, and from so many different people! People older, and younger, than me. People with less education and more education. People of various races. People of every class background. People with completely different experiences and outlooks. People who wanted to learn any number of things - and were allowed to!

And always at the center of the literacy community there have been women. Women committed to education which was inclusive, which refused to label people, which validated and built on people's experiences, which encouraged people to work and learn together, which allowed people to talk about what they wanted to learn and what they thought they were learning.

Somehow this has made me think about how different my experience of formal education was. I was privileged within the school system - I could read before I started school - but still, I was always aware that competition was the driving force at school.

In Grade Four in Winnipeg I remember there were different groups in the reading class. Each group was named after a bird. I can't remember what the group I was in was called, maybe it was the swallows. The slowest readers were the ravens. Guess who got the breaks? Swallows were not allowed - in reading class, anyway - to consort with the ravens or even to help them fly. Instead, we had a virtually free period, in which we were sent to the library to read at our own pace and write book reports.

And then there was high school. As a "good student" I was constantly plagued by doubts about how socially acceptable it was to do well at school. And no matter what I did, I STILL got good marks. Talk about being a frustrated rebel!

Let me tell you a story about an adult literacy program in 1988. It is located in a church in a neighbourhood in Toronto which has remarkably few "human services" and an abundance of factories which exceed the city's pollution standards. We have a menu of scents to delight our respiratory systems: the sharp whistle sweet of the glue factory, the dull thick ache of the animal rendering plant. So far nobody can smell the PCBs or nuclear fuel pellets. Among the riches of these beneficent factories, the adult literacy program I worked in was in a tarnished state.