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Travel Is Not Education

fi-le.net

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Re: Travel Is Not Education

#51

Post by CGamesPlay »

> Things would indeed be different if rural Dagestanians who are about to be drafted would start booking trips, but it is so telling that the digital media access, not the flight ticket is where the Kremlin intervenes. If someone wanted you to not learn about a culture, would they rather take away your opportunity to travel, or to go on the internet?

They only need to take away the internet, because the opportunity to travel never existed in the first place. And it's not as if, upon returning from your cultural experiences out west, your banking app isn't searched at the border for treacherous transactions. Physical travel is just dramatically easier to precisely control and dramatically more expensive to access, compared to digital media where you have to use a heavy-handed approach to blocking.

This post is, at it's core, "my town is being wrecked by tourism". That's perhaps a reasonable feeling for the author to have, but I don't really agree with any of the broader claims they're trying to make.

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#53

Post by PurpleRamen »

xutopia wrote: post #9

Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel. It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.

Connection is not education. It doesn't matter how deep your emotional connection is, it won't rise your education about it on itself. If you want, or need the education, you have to search for it, and you should do it from reliable sources, not just random locals telling who knows what.

The bigger problem here that many people are building opinions lacking education, and this often can lead to harmful descicions, especially in how the world is developing today.

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#54

Post by 01284a7e »

Most people live in a fake world, especially when they are playing the part of tourists.

The original post laments having to interact with these people (in Cambridge, MA - oh no, Harvard and MIT sweatshirts, maybe as a "local" you should walk off the beaten path a bit).

Looking up webcams and Wiki pages as a substitute for going places is a bad conclusion - it's even more of a fake world. The author thinks we can somehow "really beautiful how rich of a cultural understanding can be cultivated without ever setting foot in the country". Really beautiful? Come on, that's ridiculous. I get that this is Hacker News but that's a terminally online viewpoint that's warped as can be.

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#55

Post by andrepd »

yostrovs wrote: post #42
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #37

I can't but feel that there's a second, complementary point here. Will you learn something about the place you visit? Probably. But, sure, not always. It's possible that reading the web might be as effective. However, there's also the other side. To travel is to become educated about you . This experience cannot be replicated by reading the web. There's nothing quite as instructive as being blown away by the foreignn…

It seems like these days most places in Earth have become simply different versions of each other. How people dress, what they eat, what they know, their interests, and other such things are very similar almost wherever you go. Maybe traveling to central Africa or North Korea, or other very remote areas, would be radically different, but most travelers go to places where cell phones work and a portion of the public s…

It's difficult, and you detainly have to step foot outside the tourist trails for 5 minutes, which most tourists maybe don't. If you stick to the brunch places and the tourist trap museums, then yes. But the world is still incredibly diverse; if you travel you can experience this diversity, but you have to make an effort, including research and probably learning a bit of the language.

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#56

Post by FatherOfCurses »

I don't know if education and understanding are the same things, but I feel that I've always come away from places that I've travelled to with a better understanding of the place.

I'm sure that if you just do zero research about a place and just take a package tour you won't come away with any greater knowledge than they would by reading a Wikipedia article or watching a YouTube video.

But if you learn some things in advance, and then go to a place, and suddenly you have the experience of "Ooh, there's that thing I learned about!", followed by watching how locals interact with it, there has to be some deeper level of understanding that is reached there.

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#57

Post by notahacker »

yostrovs wrote: post #42
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #37

I can't but feel that there's a second, complementary point here. Will you learn something about the place you visit? Probably. But, sure, not always. It's possible that reading the web might be as effective. However, there's also the other side. To travel is to become educated about you . This experience cannot be replicated by reading the web. There's nothing quite as instructive as being blown away by the foreignn…

It seems like these days most places in Earth have become simply different versions of each other. How people dress, what they eat, what they know, their interests, and other such things are very similar almost wherever you go. Maybe traveling to central Africa or North Korea, or other very remote areas, would be radically different, but most travelers go to places where cell phones work and a portion of the public s…

That isn't really true though, unless your itinerary is focused on the centre of major cities and you're determined to stay in chain hotels, eat international food and get taxis everywhere (if your main experience of travelling overseas is business, it might look like this)

Sure, Premier League branded football shirts turn up in the unlikeliest of places and it turns out that actually people don't wear what the internet says is their national dress all that much - that's one of the first things you learn when you travel - but there's plenty that's different, even if you can only communicate with the English speakers.

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#58

Post by rstuart4133 »

jugoetz wrote: post #13

The author completely misses what travel is for. Compare it to a museum. You can see almost all of the artworks on the museum's website, in high-definition, accompanied by backstories and references. It's much more suitable to learn about art. But it's not _impressive_. You need to experience the artwork to understand and internalize what you studied about it. Same with travel.

A good example is trying to explain to someone from a car based culture (like the US) why they might enjoy living in a European city that eschews the car in favour of walking, bush bikes and public transport. The typical reaction is to explain why it would be impossible in their country, or that Europe was a historical accident, or 100 other reasons, most of which will be wrong.

You can try and explain the tradeoffs being made, but it seems mere words and video can't paint the picture. They have to experience it for themselves before they can truly understand, and consequently make sensible a judgement about whether they might like the lifestyle, or not.

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#59

Post by dguest »

blitzar wrote: post #31

I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.

But maybe you will be able to soon! The ERC apparently allocated 11M € for a project to create "an olfactory equivalent of Google Street View" [1].

(yes, I know this wasn't the point)

[1]: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101118977

Re: Travel Is Not Education

#60

Post by queenkjuul »

Having a hard time imagining an article i disagree with more honestly lol.

And i think the cause and effect is all backward for Guatemala: the CIA wanted to overthrow the country, so they invited sympathetic journalists on a staged journey. That's a very, very far cry from the experience of a typical tourist, and i think i could make a pretty compelling case that journalists who've never been to {Iraq, Venezuela, Guatemala, Palestine, et. al.} are far MORE likely to write completely out of line imperialist propaganda than the ones who have.

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