Travel as the Great Educator – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
As we end the coldest month of the year and I think ahead, I want to share with you my thoughts on the joy of travel.
For most of my life my mother traveled for her work to offices and customers near and far here in North America and in Europe. I then early on learned to love travel from her and my father, and in the process of venturing far from home I learned a great deal about our world. Travel remains for me one of the great educational resources we have available, yet the purposes of our traveling will have a clear impact upon where we go and for what reasons.
Because of these frequent forays beyond my childhood home, and our grand move west from Chicago to Kansas City when I was six years old, I learned to read maps quite quickly. I distinctly remember loving to tune the family television to the Weather Channel as a young child just to see the big colorful maps that made up most of that network’s broadcast schedule in the late ’90s (it was Channel 58 on our TV by the way). With family in both Midwestern metropolises, we often drove or flew between each city for Christmas, Easter, and big family events, and on these road trips when I could still read in the car without getting motion sick, I would spend hours engrossed in the maps and road atlases to the point that now as an adult I can navigate from memory across most of the United States.
Today of course I have a computer in my car which does most of the navigating for me, and I love having all the detailed information that it provides: distances to the next turn, estimated times of arrival (ETAs), and an overall route suggestion, yet I just as often ignore the computer’s suggestion and go whichever way feels right to me as I actually follow it. I feel that I’ve been formed to be the person I am today just as much by the places I’m from as by the places I’ve visited and the experiences I’ve had as a guest in someone else’s city.
When I was eight years old my mother took me on a grand European adventure. It was my second time crossing the Atlantic, I’d visited relatives stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Germany when I was very little, yet the first that I really experienced and can remember. Before that trip, I remember thinking that the things I was most proud of were the great American achievements of the late twentieth century which for me included the space shuttle, the great skyscrapers of Chicago, the idealized memory of cowboys, the dynastic Chicago Bulls, and of course Sammy Sosa. The two weeks that followed opened my eyes to a far wider world than I had yet imagined. I knew about Europe, but to me England and France were places more suited to a medieval and ancient past than to a vibrant present. I laugh now when I look back at the journal we kept on that trip and scrapbook that resulted from all our photos. Returning to the two great cities we visited on that trip––London and Paris––time and again afterward I’ve grown to appreciate the childish wonder that filled me in my first visit there now 23 years ago.
In the last few months, I found myself looking back at that first overseas trip and trying to recapture some of the spirit of it as I felt it so early in my life. As it turned out, after I took my parents to see the latest Indiana Jones film The Dial of Destiny last summer, I found my way into that corner of Disney+’s catalog that contains the old Young Indiana Jones Chronicles created during my first decade and recaptured some of that youthful spirit I was seeking. While not as grandiose or adventurous as Young Indy’s own childhood voyage across the Atlantic, mine was just as strong a gateway into a whole host of new stories, ideas, and possibilities that have led me to the career I enjoy today.
One thing I regret about how my teaching has gone so far is that I haven’t been able to take people on field trips to some of these great monuments to human ingenuity that mark the globe’s tourist trails. I’ve had an idea for a while of starting a freelance tour guide service, after recommendations from friends and relatives, and while this isn’t an announcement of anything grand, it’s still a suggestion of something that could come. Some of the wisest people I’ve met and read like to say that the best way to describe a setting is to visit it. My long time readers will note how specific I made the locations in my first published novella Abducted and Abandoned, something I tried to do in Erasmus Plumwood as well.
Learning on the road offers the student more than a classroom can because one is having to learn not only about the sights and sounds around them but how to interact with other people who may have very little in common with them. I always make an effort to learn the local language as best I can before I travel somewhere, something that I’m currently working on for an upcoming trip. I’ve rarely felt more embarrassed than when I don’t get the joke or understand what people are saying around me. This goes for English as well as other languages. On my second night in Finland, my phone died as I was walking back to my lodging from the tram stop and without a dictionary, I felt too embarrassed to ask the clerk in the corner market what was Finnish for ham and Swiss cheese, resulting in me buying a loaf of bread and eating that dry and alone for dinner. Last March too, during my visit to San Juan in Puerto Rico I could understand what the people were saying around me but still couldn’t quite get the confidence to reply in Spanish despite thinking up the right things to say.
Travel is a great teacher of humanity. There’s a sense of accomplishment that I feel when I make it to a waypoint or destination. I cheered the first time I drove my car within sight of the towers of Manhattan in November 2019 and sighed with relief after hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic when I made it all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico in the Florida panhandle in August 2022. On this most recent European trip I was proud with how most of the time I was finally able to converse in French without too much trouble, though I still have room to grow.
I love wandering through cities and experiencing the ordinary daily life continuing on as it would had I not been there. I love wandering into grocery stores and bookstores and seeing what familiar and foreign is for sale. I love meeting people in random places who have vague commonalities with me like the woman in the Erasmus House Garden in Brussels who joined me in a curious stroll among the medicinal herbs and asked me many questions about my research.
Today I’m traveling more than my mother for work. I tend to go to two or three academic conferences per year to present my research and will usually try to fit in another trip or two for fun. Yet even my traveling is at a low now compared to just a few years ago when I was driving four times a year on my Long Drive East to Binghamton. So much of how I travel is informed by how my parents travel, and the stories they’d bring back of their own experiences. Increasingly, while I will take photos and videos and post them to my social media accounts or save them for future editions of this Wednesday Blog, I appreciate more now the simple pleasure of being there.
I read over the weekend an argument that play is necessary among all animals and that we adult humans have a way of stripping out our playtime in exchange for more “productive” work. The author of that now lost piece suggested that one thing we could do was to create something that would be impermanent and be sure to not take a photo of it so it lasts only in our memory. I think travel fills that role for me in a way, it’s my time to be looser and play with living in a different place if only for a short while. It helps make my world feel much larger than just my neighborhood, city, state, region, or country. In travel, I to try to recapture some of my childlike wonder at seeing the richness of this our world for the first time. That, dear reader, is what makes traveling a great educator.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 