Learning Through Travel: A Journey of Discovery by Hillary

Learning Through Travel: A Journey of Discovery by Hillary - September 2024 Scholarship Essay

Although I’m not knocking traditional schooling, my favorite way to learn has always been through travel. This type of education is decidedly non-traditional, unconventional, and unorthodox – combining exploration with real-world experience in a dynamic and immersive format. I grew up taking historic vacations with my family, which sparked a childhood passion for delving into dark, little-known stories and facts often absent from the standard high-school history books. These experiences fed my perspective of the world in ways that traditional schooling couldn’t.
One of the most influential aspects of these family vacations was how they brought history to life. We didn’t just visit the usual tourist spots – we made a special effort to see sites of battles, wars, and skirmishes, even if those places were small and unremarkable. Fort Mackinac was a fantastic example of this. Located on Lake Huron's shore, any visiting kids will learn about Louis and Clark and the War of 1812 since it was a major fort for that battle series. Sure, most Americans have heard of Gettysburg, and the major Civil War sites, but we visited smaller and forgotten places where conflicts occurred and fell in love with the stories of those who lived through and profited from those places. By putting myself right in the middle of history, I was inspired to learn more about it. I began to understand that history as an academic subject is not just names and dates – it’s made up of zillions of small events with small people's stories behind them, waiting to be uncovered.
A key strength of learning through travel is its visceral, holistic character – by being present in a place, knowledge gains a certain concreteness that it can lose when taught just as handily from the lecture hall or master class. Walking in the footsteps of historical personages with their acts, standing upon the battlefields of war, entering the chamber where a pivotal decision or turning point of an argument was made, or just walking through a small, out-of-the-way local museum – these offer narrative contexts to what I’m learning. Those moments linger in my memory because I had a visceral, bodily experience. Travel fulfills Aristotle's philosophical bottom line as a way of knowing the world: it educates the senses as much as the mind.
Today, outside of formal education, I still apply this love of learning the obscure to new subjects – now, I can look up obscure facts about places I’ve never visited but am interested in. To feed my curiosity, I look up conflicts, cultural phenomena, or less well-known historical figures. Whether it’s about some forgotten detail in a small European village’s involvement in the Second World War or about indigenous resistance movements in some forgotten corner of the world, the technique is that I still allow myself to find these hidden bits of knowledge.
I can tell you without hesitation that learning through travel has enriched my life because it has deepened my historical knowledge and given me a broader perspective on the world and the complexities through which history and culture have shaped it. It has taught me to read events beyond their headlines and look not only for the external trends of history but also at what is happening worldwide. It has given me a lifelong habit of learning and trying to learn new things, not just in school but as part of my everyday life. Whenever I visit a new place, I can always find something I didn’t know, a new person, and my capacities.