If you ask any of my kids today what their most important experience was in their education, they would say it was the travel and the ability to see and be in other cultures.
My mother would take groups of students to different countries and always brought us along, so by the time I was 10, I had been to Russia, China, Nicaragua and several other countries.
Travelling. ... when men of sober age travel, they gather knowlege which they may apply usefully for their country
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
Personally, I now aim for one month of overseas relocation or high-intensity learning (tango, fighting, whatever) for every two months of work projects.
To travel, to experience and learn: that is to live.
My education was seeing and touching the world. I would read about the history of a castle with my mother - who was a teacher, so she home-schooled me - and then she would take me to the castle, and we would climb on it, and then I'd write creatively about it that night.
I do a lot of reading, a lot of studying. I ask questions, I'll go out, travel these countries, I'll watch how their people live, and I learn.
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and it's fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.
My advice to any traveler who is traveling in order to learn would be: 'Fight tooth and nail to be permitted to travel in what is technically the least efficient way.'
I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.
People should have freedom in their pilgrimages and tours. They should come and visit historical monuments and sites - let's say the sites around Iran - where they can easily engage in wide- scale contacts with others.
I had an unusual college experience because I traveled the world while going to school at the same time. Now, to look back, I was very lucky.
I want to go Africa. I want to go to China. There are some places I want to go not to work, but to really explore and to see for my own education.
There has been a real influence on young people, whose travel is experiential. For them, their values change when their experiences change; travel is like a university without walls.
