From the Panhandle

Higher Education Is Just What We Need

By Cate Huisman, 12-04-09

	Schweitzer terrain park--North Idaho College is grooming the groomers.

An impressive aspect of American education is that it gives potential scholars innumerable second chances in myriad forms, and plenty of options if they change their minds in mid-degree. As wife of a man who started college at 18 and got his first degree at 35 and two more degrees at 55 and 56, and as mother of a 19-year-old who left after his first year of college to teach English to monks in northern India, I have evidence aplenty of the advantages of these options, right in my own nuclear family.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I read—in the Bonner County Daily Bee—the list of courses available this winter in our northern branch of North Idaho College, the main campus of which is in the distant southern burg of Coeur d’Alene. This far campus is in a fabulously beautiful setting on Lake Coeur d’Alene; it has a view toward the mountains, a swimming beach, and a sailing dock. But these charms are minimally appealing in winter, and the 45-mile drive down to the big city can be quite snowy and slippery. So we northerners like the idea of courses closer to home—in the bustling, big-box-store-intensive Sandpoint suburb of Ponderay. (NIC also offers courses in Bonners Ferry, another 30 miles up toward Canada, and in several of the communities in the Silver Valley east of Coeur d’Alene.)

Our local campus, housed in our quiet shopping mall, doesn’t quite have the cachet of the southern one, but it has the advantage of proximity. Here we can fill those nagging requirements for basics without leaving home--there are lots of English composition courses and several levels of mathematics, as well as some history courses. Science courses are perennially popular; geology and psychology options are already full.

A corollary of the idea that we can educate ourselves forever and wherever and whenever we choose is the idea that we can tailor our education to what we need, in our community, now. Thus, this winter’s offerings include Practical Nursing, which might help us fill some of the open positions at Bonner General Hospital; or Small Business Accounting, which might help our entrepreneurs stagger through the tax-filing season and be ready for the throngs that will arrive in summer.

My favorite of the courses offered this winter, Terrain Park Management—offered conveniently in the evening after the lifts close—is an example of just how closely we can shape our course offerings to the needs of our community. One can surmise, given this education option, that our ski area can look forward to employing well-educated individuals in constructing ever-more-impressive piles of sculpted snow to launch ourselves gracefully off of, and that these individuals will also provide more and better safeguards to help protect us from the worst consequences of our ill-advised launches.

Perhaps that post-landing pretzel-formation tendency is the reason that Introduction to Yoga is already full too.

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