With so many kids returning to school in August (which cheats them out of several weeks of summer, if you ask me), our attention returns to the importance of learning and the great debate over whether travel is, in and of itself, educational.
I believe firmly that travel is always educational.
Yes, my kids learned their multiplication tables on the road over the many hours we spent reciting in sing-song voices, "One times one is one. One times two is two....") And, yes, my daughter learned plenty about the Revolutionary War during a visit to the living history museum at Colonial Williamsburg. And, yes, my kids and I both learned a lot about dolphins because we were able to swim with them.
But I'm not really talking about that kind of education from travel. The learning that happens on a family vacation is so much more subtle and so much more fundamental than that.
By spending time in Mexico, my kids have learned a deep appreciation of the culture of Mexico. By traveling across America, my kids have seen that there are places in our melting pot country where only white people live, a shock for my children, who are being raised in multi-cultural community. By visiting other cities, they are better able to look at their own with a critical eye, seeing the things Chicago does well and the things it doesn't.
By traveling to the mountains, I learned that I need to be near to water to be happy while my son learned that he might be happier living above the tree line.
But the most important lesson any of us has learned is that the family-building and memory-making potential of travel is limitless. And that's something no school can teach.
