Travel Is Not Education

I can't but feel that there's a second, complementary point here.

Will you learn something about the place you visit? Probably. But, sure, not always. It's possible that reading the web might be as effective.

However, there's also the other side. To travel is to become educated about you. This experience cannot be replicated by reading the web. There's nothing quite as instructive as being blown away by the foreignness of another place, the language, the customs - the sheer strangeness of it to you. How you react to it, or manage it, or negotiate it are lessons worth learning. That's the education.

> To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ₺100,000 liras to spend as well, but they simply don't need it to win.

Was this written by some AI or LLM because what kind of logic is that? Someone who travels vs. who reads? Is that an even worthy experiment? No..

The person reading Wikipedia and the person who visited the place are both beaten by the person who read Wikipedia and then visited the place. Reading about a place can point you to unique experiences that you would otherwise have missed.

A deeper point, I think, is about being the kind of person who would read about a place. I know a few people who get excited about going on holiday, and excitedly tell you about it when they get back, but they just end up talking about the places they went drinking and the people they met, possibly with some Instagram pictures that look exactly the same as everyone else's Instagram pictures of that place. There's a lot of people in the developed world who just go travelling because it's a thing that people with money do: they're not even interested in learning about a foreign culture.

The author completely misses what travel is for. Compare it to a museum. You can see almost all of the artworks on the museum's website, in high-definition, accompanied by backstories and references. It's much more suitable to learn about art. But it's not _impressive_. You need to experience the artwork to understand and internalize what you studied about it. Same with travel.

At risk of offend that genuinely reads like a post by someone who has never left their home country.

Wikipedia and streetview is in no shape or form comparable to experiencing something first hand.

Nor is the assumption that people do one or the other correct. Ideally you first do the online research to plan travel and then go.

I'll give you one example -- Bali, Indonesia.

If you visit Bali for a week or even a month, you likely won't notice that Bali is in a strange little island in a massive country. You'll likely fly in and out of Bali and never visit the rest of Indonesia. What is the relation between Bali and the rest of the country? No idea.

Even a question as simple as what do the locals eat is a difficult question as a tourist. Who do you ask? If you ask a few people, you might get the wrong impression, it at least one that doesn't represent the whole place.

Think about your own country. Your own neighborhood. If a tourist came up to you to ask about how things work in your area, can you give a comprehensive answer? I sure can't.

Life is far too short to learn from travel. I'm not saying don't travel but we should keep our expectations in check.

I grew up in a tourism economy. I have traveled to half a dozen countries.

I side with the author. Viewing consumer travel for entertainment only makes you more learned if you care to observe and think critically, which most do not do as that detracts from the indulgent entertainment aspect of it and even then it's very limited.

The nit picks of the offended peanut gallery here are technically perfectly valid, you won't learn everything from wikipedia and street view either, but they don't invalidate the broader point that galavanting about as a tourist doesn't really teach you squat. It's a luxury. The .03% "education" component doesn't really change that.

I can’t think of a country I’ve visited where my preconceptions gathered from the sources the author mentions haven’t been turned on their head.

I'm born and raised in the midwest of the USA. I've watched UK shows since the 80s when PBS would run Doctor Who, Keeping Up Appearances, and other UK shows. I've never read a history devoted to London or the UK but I know the basics. This summer I visited London for the first time and there were so many things I either had no idea about or knew in the abstract but experiencing it first hand was very different.

Most people who travel just go to unfamiliar restaurants and unfamiliar shops. I imagine that a LOT of HN people do not fall into this trend, but for most people travel seems to be more about a feeling of novelty and adventure than it is really about specifically learning about the locale you're visiting.

I get the author's point, but it's a bit "light". I enjoyed this article which truly helped me to see other perspective: "The Case Against Travel" which cites great philosophers and writers https://archive.is/OCBJf

I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.

It is not even remotely close making a comparison between reading an article on Wikipedia and visiting a country for 10 days.

It's like saying that just reading about s*x is better than actually doin it.

I wouldn’t suggest anyone take this piece serious; you would be doing yourself a disservice. A strange thing I’ve noticed about street view. Whenever I show up to a new place that I’ve viewed on street view I remark on how different it feels from what I expected. Maybe I recognize the konbini on the corner and know that it marks the left turn I need to make. But never have I felt like street view was even close to actually being there.

> Not that it would have been logistically feasible back then, but I do sometimes ask myself if Pearl Harbor could have been prevented if enough Japanese statesmen had gone to vacation in New York.

Well we kind of know what the answer is. Toward the end of WW2 when the US was drawing up the list of cities to bomb, Kyoto got removed from the list at the insistence of the Secretary of War. He understood the cultural importance of the city, likely because he had travelled there. I’m surprised the author hadn’t read about it on Wikipedia.

But back to my point. Sitting and staring into my magic 13-inch rectangle starts to make me feel like…nothing. A formless gel of facts and trivia. Travel makes me feel like a human being again. Travel may not be education but I do think that, when done well, it is wisdom.

Total touch grass moment.

There's more to education than just trivia and there's more to travel than just learning about the place you're in.

The only way to learn about the human condition is by meeting other humans.

Meeting someone from a vastly different culture and finding similarities is far more education than simply eading about how they are different.

Experiencing the flow of life _now_ and feeling the influence of history can only enrich the book knowledge of a place.

Sounds like this person could use some travel to teach them about empathy and patience for others. Their books don't seem to be sufficient.

It's very easy to construct strawman examples where the worst ways to travel are compared to some abstract "best" way of learning as if that proves anything.

Reading up on something is a great way to discover the "high order bits" but it's very hard, apart from being in person, to ever pick up the "low order bits". I recently had a friend visit Australia and notice that attitudes towards mild speeding were very different from the US, not something you ever could have found from hours of trawling on the internet. One of the hundreds of different observations he made on the trip.

Every travel opportunity for me has used these low order bits to propel huge amounts of reading to fill in the missing high order bits that mesh with it. On a recent trip to South Korea, I became obessessed with the South Korean presentation (or rather, the lacuna) of the country's history 1955-1987. I went to countless history museums around Seoul just so I could see what they wanted attendees to know about Korea between the day-by-day recap of the Korean War and the miracle of K-Pop and industrialization. It was interesting the degree of frankness each museum had but all of them made me delve much more into the scholarly writing to see what was pointedly omitted.

You may claim, but it is not true.

Vaguely reminds me of Mary's Room ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument ). You can learn a lot from going somewhere and experiencing it that you just can't from Wikipedia. Obviously there is a lot you will learn from reading that you won't get from travel too, but that stuff isn't necessarily better.

Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel.

It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.

This is like reading somebody's linkedin vs working with them for a month.

BTW the value gained from travel is dropping with every new country. The single biggest lesson is just noticing everything you assumed is obvious and natural that is actually just accidental and specific to your country. Especially Americans would benefit from it.

New hype unblocked: Tourism is a bad thing

having just returned from a trip to asia and australia, i can confidently say that the basic premise of this article is mistaken. reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country. the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you. is this satire? is this written by a bed bound agoraphobic? dont be silly. education is more than reciting the after effects of chinese rule on a small nation, its more than knowing dates of revolutions and the current form of government. education is context and perspective, macro to micro, the where and why and how. if education is wikipedia then philosophy is dirty limericks and science is air fryers.