See The World
The role of travel in education should be formally instituted and made into a requirement.
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Today, I went riding on my bike through the backroads of Nicaragua, far up into mountain coffee country. As you travel through the many small villages, so far from everything, you feel at peace. But you also feel something is missing. The kids running out to greet you, all excited, seem to be missing something. So many opportunities they’ll never get, so much they’ll never see. Like myself, 16 years old. I remember the first time I got in an elevator. Wow. Still remember that moment, bigger than the first time I tied up my own shoes.
I’ve taught a few courses on education. Basically, an examination of what the role of education is, in society and how it has developed. Its ethos, its purpose. Helping teachers develop their own philosophies of education.
And during that time, I became convinced that education was missing one big piece of the picture puzzle. Praxis.
“For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” - Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Praxis is how we take our learning and apply it. The injection of purpose into our learning and taking it out into the real world for testing, and application. But praxis is also, a reflection on our situation, our being in the world. An entering INTO the world.
Travel to me, is praxis “en total”. It should be a mandatory part of our curriculums and our educating of youth - a kind of universal praxis added to the course learning of our schools. And I don’t mean school trips. I mean, actual “live abroad” requirements - programs where students live in another country, experience the culture of a far away place and people.
All kids should have the opportunity to not just travel but LIVE a good number of months abroad. To see the diversity of culture, belief, living that exists. It’s the proper way to let the yeast rise and make good bread. No better education can be bought, had, than traveling. We owe this to our kids in school. It would be money very well spent.
But the naysayers will say - let the parents pay. Well, many can’t. And many won’t even think of doing this for their kids. It’s just not an apparent thing. And education, public education’s role is to “fill in the gaps” and provide what parents, what life does not. It’s an investment in our future. When will we have some politicos smart enough to see this?
I am a citizen of the world. Nothing is foreign to me.
But the naysayers will also say - the world is becoming a village, smaller. Kids experience travel on Nat Geo TV. Or all the immigrants coming through our town. I say, not the same. Not the same at all. A cot is not a bed. Milk is not the same as ice cream. Students need to be “in situ”, to have the time to immerse themselves with and through “the other”, and traveling provided these fortified vitamins that no other plant, procedure, living can.
I had the hope with the internet, with jet travel, with traveling being easier - the world would become a more open, tolerant, questioning, curious, “educated” place. As more people could and did travel, there would be more true education and personal growth happening. Yet, the opposite seems to have happened. Borders are closing. It’s harder and harder to live abroad. The world is becoming more tribal and less open to outsiders. It’s damn depressing. But that is why we need to leave our kids alone by sending them to live abroad for a time and get educated - so they can temper some of the effects of their schooling.
Myself, I’ve been a homeless mind for a long time. I’m living proof that traveling, not the touristy type stuff but the actual living Kundera’s “life is elsewhere”, works. It makes you into a person more questioning, more engaged with life. Travel allows us to see possibilities and not sink into our own cultural stasis and norms. It empowers creativity. It teaches us that we are a community and need to care for each other - through travel the traveler experiences vulnerability and reliance on others, far from home.
Travel leaves us vulnerable and that allows us to become more open, to not shutter ourselves within, it allows the essential ingredients for true learning (and all learning is in the end, tacit, personal, absorbed into ourselves as sentient beings). All learning is but theory unless we are put into a situation where we MUST apply it.
So after 30+ years in education, I’m dismayed that no progressive education exists, mandating and providing students with a full year of school abroad. Paid and required. Maybe somewhere out there, this is part of the syllabus. If so, let me know.
I’ll leave you with this fine example of praxis in action. So much this guy is learning! For learning is living, living is learning.
My Life
I dug holes to find
the blue sky.
I went around corners
to look for home.
I spoke a million words
in search of silence.
Today, the wind tore off my roof
and I could now see
the sky.
Best to let life do
the hard work for you.