Inspired to Worldschool
By Janet LoSole
Note from Jen: According to Time4Learning, Worldschooling, a type of homeschooling, 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.” See below for more about Janet LoSole’s journey into worlschooling with her chidlren.
My young adult years were spent traipsing through Europe with a backpack. In those days, there were gangs of us meeting up at hostels, going over entries in the dog-eared Let’s Go travel guide. Once, in Athens, I joined a group of Canadians crossing the Mediterranean on the cheap by sleeping open-air on the deck of a ferry. No internet in those days; I called my parents once a week from the international telephone stations dotted across the continent. My desire to travel never waned, even when I returned to my studies. After a few years, I decided to take a break from school to head out again, telling my boyfriend (now husband) that he could come with me. Or not.
We found teaching jobs in Korea, then flew south to explore Australia. My biological clock started ticking on the island of Waiheke in New Zealand, where I’d gone alone, to renew my Australian tourist visa. So, we left to establish a stable home in Canada, had a couple of kids, bought a minivan. But the travel itch persisted, like a stubborn infection.
When the girls were still young, I didn’t dare dream of taking them on an adventure, but a friend mentioned whale-watching in Québec, and I proposed that journey to my husband because it was only a ten-hour drive and within our own country. The girls were four and six by then but enjoyed the excursions to see whales and seals and screamed with laughter sliding down sand dunes in Tadoussac, the oldest European settlement in North America. It got me thinking that maybe they weren’t too young to backpack after all.
The internet was in the early stages then; I did not have the luxury of reading the countless blogs that exist today to learn how to manage the vagaries of international travel with two children. But I found two books quite by accident in my dad’s online second hand bookstore. The first, The Voyage of the Northern Magic, written by the late journalist Diane Steumer, was utterly inspirational. Recounting a four-year journey with her husband and four sons on an around-the-world trek by sailboat, the family’s tales of visiting locations from Zanzibar to Sri Lanka had me spellbound. The next: Adventuring with Children, by Nan Jeffrey was useful, not just because she homeschooled her kids like we did, but because the book is full of tips on what to pack, instructions on first aid, and ideas on budgeting.
The dam broke, emotionally speaking, on a cold winter evening, when my husband announced his salary was no longer covering our expenses. While he was working night and day, I was at home teaching the girls. Our credit cards were nearly maxed out. He asked me to pick up some part-time work to help, so I did. Now we were absent from our daughters more than we wished, and it made little difference to our fiscal situation. We needed a drastic change. I knew we could not sail around the world like the Steumers, but we could go on an adventure, too, couldn’t we?
In a flurry of googling (the internet had caught up), we discovered teaching opportunities in Costa Rica, a country whose infrastructure inspired confidence that we could visit with the girls and whose cost of living would free us from the shackles of debt.
So, we sold all to finance the trip, eliminating the debt with some left over. We learned from Adventuring with Children how to travel on an extreme budget, which we did until a teaching job materialized. For several months we backpacked along the Caribbean Coast, saving endangered sea turtles, staying overnight in the jungle with an Indigenous family, and crossing into Panama to renew our tourist visas. It was at that moment, on a rickety bridge spanning the Rio Sixaloa, separating Panama from Costa Rica and clutching the hands of my six and eight-year-olds, that I knew we could tackle the entire region.
We saw the famous canal, visited monkey sanctuaries, camped on the beaches, and learned about the civil war in Nicaragua. We ziplined, spelunked, hiked the rainforests, bird watched in Honduras, sampled spicy hot sauce in Belize, and scaled the ancient Mayan Temples of Tikal, in Guatemala. I recorded it all in a blog and sent dispatches home to friends and family. We arrived home nearly two years later, broke and suntanned.
Watching the snowplow rumble past my driveway that first winter home, I joined Facebook and found groups full of families dedicated to “worldschooling”, the deliberate act of traveling with kids to expose them to other languages and cultures and decided it was time for me to tell our story, to encourage other families to travel with their kids, because it is the best education in the world.
Janet LoSole is the author of Adventure by Chicken Bus: An Unschooling Odyssey through Central America. She and her husband of 25 years use the communities of the world to homeschool their two girls, who, when they are not travelling, read books and sing show tunes. Her writing on homeschooling and travelling can be found on her website.
