Long Term Benefit of Educational Travel as a Family

How we become associated to travel and holidays can shape our life more than we think.

 “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine 

Was our first contact travelling long distances by road across our own country or a flight to a foreign distant land? Were our family holidays spent on the beaches of the Costa Sol or hiking in the Lake District? Were we sent as children to a summer camp alone or did we get to experience educational travel together with our family? Was our first holiday abroad as an independent traveller back packing across North America or partying in Ibiza?

The answer to each of these questions starts a domino effect of interelated consequences exposing us to different experiences and hence playing a part in forming our character. There is no binary – right or wrong answer – for which experiences are better but the point remains that how we experience travel at young age has far reaching effects on our personality and values, including our openess to other cultures.

It is for this reason that family educational holidays can add huge value to a child, not just in the right now gains but in a longer term attitude about what equals a positive holiday adventure. Sharing the experience with your child opens you up to new bonding experiences with them and shows them that you value learning, enriching their own value for the educational experience. Also having a productive learning part to your holiday often means that you value the relax moments doing nothing even more, associating the pleasure of doing nothing as something earned rather than taken.

There are many opportunities for family educational travel but what matters most is that it combines three parts:

• A learning focus that fits with something being learned in normal life i.e. a language holiday in Spain gives a real opportunity to use the spanish learned at school or night class.
• Provides right teaching environment for children and adults separtely but then also the opportunity to combine their learning experience together in social moments.
• Is fun, as ultimately, it must still feel like a holiday in order to provide the positive memories to want to repeat the experience in the future.

So this summer when considering your family holiday why not give a serious thought to doing a family educational holiday as it could be give your child a positive long term association with learning in their free time.

Douglas Haines runs Spark Spanish with his wife Inge. Spark runs educational trips for schools throughout the year and in summer runs a personal Family Programme in Spain which combines adult Spanish learning with a summer camp experience whilst the family stays in a cultural residence.