Travel experiences enrich education

You've heard the statement, "You learn more outside the classroom in college than inside."

This is because four years of freedom shapes you in ways that economics never can. Personal growth outside the classroom complements your intellectual growth inside.

However, travel has been the only experience in my life where personal and intellectual growth have coincided in a simultaneous and unconscious way.

Travel embeds a sense of intellectual curiosity that remains with you forever, while taking the abstract knowledge we learn in class and transforming it into reality.

This is as stark a difference as thinking about making a five- course meal versus its actually being right in front of you waiting to be devoured. Travel is the invisible chef.

As an international studies major, I have taken eight classes in five disciplines discussing globalization. What I learned is that the term means nothing, because it means everything.

Each class defined the term differently, but all were the same in their ambiguity. They were long and boring, and quite frankly, I didn't care.

It wasn't until I was in the middle of China glued to the train window and saw a huge Wal-Mart from the train window that I began to care.

In class I learned about the spread of multinational corporations, but it was a concept. Now it was reality as I sped through the Chinese countryside halfway around the world.

It wasn't until I spoke to my host father, who has lived in the small, poverty-stricken town of Akrofonso, about the struggle of implementing structural adjustment programs in Ghana that I began to understand.

I learned of the World Bank's structural adjustment programs for highly indebted countries in a political science class, but at the time it was little more than another homework assignment. Now, it meant everything as the man shook his head and said, "We have no health care because the government can't spend money."

It wasn't until I was fighting to understand an excited Japanese student speaking of his love for Eminem that I began to wonder.

In anthropology class my teacher spoke about the spread of ideas and the spread of pop culture. I didn't really care. Now, I was stunned by this guy's love for Eminem because he barely spoke a word of English. How can you like Eminem if you can't even understand him?

But travel is much more than the reality it gives to the abstractions of the classroom. It is the interactions with local people that have really inspired me to keep learning about why the world is the way it is.

In Japan, the host father of my one-day homestay gave me a fossil that his father gave him from Nepal. I was blown away by the affection shown to me by a relative stranger.

In my final days in Ghana, my host brother came into my room and said, "Yaodom, I cannot sleep. I do not want you to leave. I feel pain in my chest."

You never get over moments like that.

Though I've forgotten many of the small moments I thought would never fade, what has remained is a sense of purpose to learn.

This is what drags me out of bed for an 8 a.m. class after a night out.

That is why, as I look back on my college experience, I realize it wasn't so much outside the classroom but outside the country that has influenced me the most.

 

Contact Scott Burr at sburr@email.unc.edu.