HOW TRAVELLING AS A PART OF EDUCATION ??
IS TRAVELLING A PART OF EDUCATION ??
From immemorial, traveling has been considered a part of one's education.
The Englishmen, in particular, consider their schooling incomplete without a tour of the continent.
Travelling is one of the most delightful experiences of humankind. People have always enjoyed going from place to place seeing men and things.
In India, unfortunately, foreign travel has not been much encouraged, and in fact, there was a time when crossing the seas was declared to be highly irreverent.
Men like Mahatma Gandhi were ex-communicated going for going beyond the seas. This ostrich mentally brought about the worst type of intellectual stagnation in India and caused its ignominious downfall.
Traveling both inside and outside the country is a powerful aid to education. It provides an experience of the world and calls into action and practical use of various qualities of mind and intellect developed by education.
Tact, firmness, engaging personality, and lively conversation are comprehensive and intensive traveling products.
However highly educated a person may not have lived moved among people with different habits, languages, social customs, and morality, his outlook remains narrow.
He is less accomodating in his views and often fanatical in outlook. But those who have traveled widely are generally liberal in outlook.
They have a maturity of judgment and are infallible in their understanding of people and their minds.
The advantage of traveling in the narrow sense of the world 'education' is equally remarkable. Geography is a dull and uninspiring subject if it is studied in the classrooms.
The Himalayas are a figment of the imagination and the mighty Ganga nothing more than a snaky line running along with the map.
But if the student sees these places, the dull subject of Geography becomes living and absorbing.
The same thing applies to history. History, as it is taught in schools at present, is nothing but a catalog of dead kings and the dates of their births and deaths.
If, however, history is taught about the achievements of these dead kings and students are given opportunities to visit frequently the scenes of the glories and defeats of the dead Monarchs, history will become as interesting a subject as any other.
In independent India, we have become suddenly alive to the need to learn a few other languages.
To learn a foreign language through the old methods would take a lifetime, and even then, our mastery of it may not be very confident.
But the quickest and the best, if not the cheapest, method of learning a new language is to live and move among the people who speak it.
Thus, to learn English, one must live in England and learn Chinese in China.
The learning of a foreign language is the first step towards the understanding of a nation. In the present-day world, the knowledge between the various nations of the world is a great necessity.
There can be no peace without international understanding.
Travelling is, no doubt, expensive and inconvenient.
But for broadening the mind, growing out of narrow and parochial views, developing international culture, traveling inside one's land and beyond it is essential.
After all, we are all living in the 'One World,' and unless the Inhabitants of the globe understand one another well, there cannot be any prospect of peace and amity between the world's nations.
We are facing the crisis of "ONE WORLD OR NONE WORLD."
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