October 21, 2024
6 min read
Worldschooling Is Catching On. Here’s What You Need to Know
People are pulling their kids out of traditional education to learn while they travel. Data on educational success are limited, but there are other reasons to consider worldschooling
Students at Green School in Bali, a well-known choice for parents who worldschool their children.
This piece is part of Scientific American’s column The Science of Parenting. For more, go here.
A decade ago I started studying an emerging trend among middle-class families who were taking their children out of school, selling their homes, and leaving well-paying jobs to travel the world. At the time, worldschooling was for self-proclaimed countercultural rebels. Today, it is smack dab in the mainstream. The pandemic may have temporarily halted travel for many families, but it has fueled a fascination with the worldschooling lifestyle, and its popularity has only grown. When parents realized that they could work and their kids could learn remotely, there was nothing to keep them fromhitting the road once pandemic restrictions eased. You’ve probably seen such families featured in the news or on social media and you may have even asked yourself: Should I be doing that with my kids?
There is very little scientific research to help answer that question, and we lack longitudinal studies on worldschooling’s long-term educational and developmental outcomes. For parents with wanderlust, the opportunity to liberate themselves from societal constraints, foster family bonding and raise globally minded kids may seem too sweet to miss. Some of these aspirations align with kids’ academic needs, but not always. So in the absence of hard data, how do parents decide to uproot their lives and let the world be their children’s classroom? Drawing on my ethnographic research with dozens of traveling families over the past decade, here are some factors to consider if you are weighing whether and how to worldschool your children.
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When it comes educating kids while on the move, the options seem endless. As one of the mothers in my study put it, “There’s no perfect choice, but there’s a thousand good ones.” These options fall along a continuum ranging from highly structured online programs to the more laissez-faire practice of unschooling. Where the worldschooling parents I studied fell on this continuum depended both on their own goals and values and on their children’s needs. Those who were generally satisfied with their kids’ conventional school experiences back home or who wanted to ensure their children were credentialed for postsecondary education tended to subscribe to formal or accredited online educational programs. They kept their children on a regular academic schedule.
If learning another language was a priority, or if homeschooling was not legal in their destination, some parents enrolled their children for a term in a local school. Parents wanting a structured but alternative option enrolled their kids in local Montessori or Waldorf (also known as Steiner) schools or in private schools such as the Green School in Bali, Indonesia or the Jungle School in Huatulco, Mexico. While scholars have traced the social and academic outcomes of alternative schooling models like Montessori and Waldorf, studies of Bali’s Green School and details about alumni outcomes have tended to focus less on academic performance and more on students’ long-term conservation behaviors and attitudes toward sustainability.
The majority of families in my research sample adopted the approach known as unschooling. Inspired by the work of educational philosopher John Holt, unschooling advocates natural, self-paced learning led by a child’s intrinsic curiosity and innate desire to explore their environment. Parents accompany their child’s learning journey, but they neither direct it nor insist on set outcomes. In my research sample, unschooling was particularly appealing to parents who were wary of the standardized curricula, high-stakes testing, single-age cohorts, systemic racism or rote learning they associated with conventional schooling.
Unschooling was also attractive to parents who worried their children might be constrained by a diagnosis of ADHD in an institutional school setting. Through unschooling, they could embrace their child’s boundless energy and need for movement as an avenue rather than an obstacle to learning, though this could also mean foregoing mandated resources for special education and related services. Unschooling offered an antidote to these concerns about formal schooling while aligning nicely with the lifestyle values of freedom, autonomy and self-reliance that drew many parents to worldschooling in the first place. And it didn’t hurt that the loose schedule of unschooling dovetailed with the flexibility needed for frequent travel.
But does unschooling work? Assessing the learning outcomes of unschooling is a difficult task, especially since the philosophy eschews standard benchmarks of educational achievement. A few scholars have tried to quantify its long-term effects. In one study, survey data from adults who had been unschooled at home as children show that a majority go on to pursue higher education and experience few difficulties gaining college admission or adjusting to university-level coursework. The results also indicate that a majority of unschoolers end up in careers as artists or entrepreneurs or in STEM fields. Whether these findings map onto kids who are unschooled in the context of worldschooling remains to be seen without systematic longitudinal studies; anecdotal evidence from the parents in my research suggests mixed results.
Many worldschooling parents have proclaimed unschooling a success, at least according to their own standards. They reported that their children were well ahead of their grade level in most subjects, that they had rediscovered a love of learning, or that they had been accepted to the university of their choice. Others were less sure. They worried about what to do with a kid whose idea of unschooling is playing video games all day or with children who aren’t naturally interested in learning chemistry. Some of the parents I interviewed regretted the fact that their kids had gaps in their knowledge, such as not knowing all the U.S. presidents or elements on the periodic table. So why do some of these frustrated parents stick with it?
Even in these cases, parents argued that what their children did learn on the road more than made up for what they didn’t learn. In particular, these parents valued what I call an “emotional curriculum” over the academic canon. What I mean by this is that parents noticed their children were learning key life lessons and emotional skills. They watched their children learn how to be independent, how to handle risk in a healthy way, how to communicate across cultural differences, how to be enterprising, how to make new friends quickly and say goodbye easily, how to handle homesickness and how to cope with change. Parents felt that these emotional competencies would serve their children well—perhaps even better than what they could have learned at school—as they entered an uncertain global labor market.
Without data, however, it’s difficult to know if these lessons pay off later the way parents hope they will. This is why we need more scientific research on the long-term outcomes of worldschooling, which would have a twofold benefit. Not only would this help prospective worldschoolers decide whether to travel with their school-aged children, but the findings may also inform place-based schools about what works in worldschooling and how similar experiences might be incorporated into all children’s classrooms. Although shifts toward remote work and online education have made worldschooling increasingly feasible for many middle-class professionals, the enormous investment of time, money and planning this lifestyle requires means worldschooling is still limited to relatively privileged families. Further research could help bridge this gap.
If you’re thinking that the benefits of worldschooling seem to outweigh the drawbacks, but don’t have the resources or the circumstances to undertake this lifestyle, take heart. Most worldschoolers agree that worldschooling is a mindset more than a practice. If the idea of educating your children outside of the conventional parameters of institutional schooling appeals to you, but you aren’t quite ready to take your children traveling around the world, think about how you can bring the world to your children. Some worldschooling families who travel only during summer breaks or on the weekends intentionally incorporate educational destinations and activities. Others try to take their children on day trips or find other ways to expose them to different cultures or foster their natural instincts to learn about their environment. Wherever you are is just as good a place as any to let the world be your child’s classroom.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
