Alternative Education: A Glance at World Schooling

There’s certainly no right way to finish school. Generally speaking, education is a life-long process and we’re all pretty much still working on figuring out what’s the best way to learn. While some of us prefer to stick to traditional learning methodologies and schools, other may prefer these alternative educational approaches.

This time, we’re paying a little bit more attention to World schooling.

What does World schooling education mean?

“World schooling is an educational movement that recognizes that a student can receive no greater education than by experiencing and interacting with the world around them. For families able to make it work, this often involves traveling together and using the journeys to enhance their child(ren)’s education.” – Time4Learning

Sounds great doesn’t it? You have the definition in the term itself – The world is your school. The phrase we have often heard and considered as only a wise thing elder people say, has now become a reality for many children around the world. And we’re seeing this rise as an alternative education form, mostly because of the flexibility that parents have nowadays and the rising trend in the digitalization of work. Parents are able to work remote, hence, they can manage to take their children and see places, as long as they have at minimum a lap-top where they could get their job done.

What does world schooling’s ‘curriculum’ include?

What’s most important to know, is that the curriculum and the things learned through world schooling depend on the parents. They are the ones who make the decision on which places they want to visit – as the most fundamental aspect of this alternative education is traveling, and what they want to learn out of those places. Time4learning gathers some of the things that all families have in common, when they decide to pursue world-schooling:

• A desire to travel
• A wish to introduce children to the wider world around them
• A holistic approach to learning
• A preference for experiential learning to solidify knowledge
• A need for flexibility in exploring children’s talents that traditional schooling cannot provide
• A desire to understand and become sensitive to other world-views

Although world schooling’s curriculum consists mostly of experiences that one has while traveling, there are also people who want to still pursue formal level of education to some extent. That’s why they may enroll their children in the schools of places they’re traveling to.

However, when doing this, one has to also bear in mind the overwhelming impact that changing friendships and school environments may have on children. They may become easily troubled and disturbed, once they are constantly moving away from people they grow fond of during formal school. Yet, you can also stick to keeping children out of traditional classrooms, if you have time and flexibility to do the teaching yourself.

Is World Schooling considered Unschooling or Homeschooling?

Many people share this sort of confusion, when thinking about all the combined methodologies that world schooling works with. Now, depending on the perspective you see things, world schooling is both unschooling and homeschooling. Unschooling solely, refers to that type of homeschooling that lets the child take control of their own education by allowing them to pursue their passions and interests in the form of projects, by exploring or experiencing field trips instead of following a traditional curriculum.

It’s this combination that makes things so much more exciting than traditional schools alone. Kids are constantly having structured adventures, and parents are there to assist with other basic skills that muse be learned, such as reading, writing, or arithmetic. It is a very revolutionary thing to do, to merge curiosity, adventures of exploring the world with a sense of formal education, on a more structured approach.

The outputs of allowing your children the freedom to follow their own interests and engage in activities for which they feel passionate about, consist in the skills that they will naturally develop, nourishing their self-confidence, and discovering their own purpose. After all , “not all classrooms have four walls”.

Photos: Shutterstock / Photomontage: Martina Advaney

We spy more alternative education content here:

Montessori Education: Why Should You Try It?

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