Small School, Big World

A smaller world threatens to be a more provincial world. For all that the Internet and the century of technology behind it have shrunk the world, if my “experience” of those around the globe comes through a glowing screen—images and sounds, but no real contact—and I never leave the comfort of my study, I may never really be touched or reached by those far away.

Lowell Monke (author of Breaking Down the Digital Walls: Learning to Teach in a Post-Modem World), then teaching in an urban high school in Iowa, describes his AP students leaving a computer lab—this was the 1990s, before laptops and wireless Internet—after “conversing” with students around the world. The door across the hall opened, and international students poured out of an English as a second language class. Monke watched in disbelief as his engaged, intelligent, sensitive, worldly students ignored every one of the living, breathing foreign students who were now walking down the hall with them, side by side. Monke, a believer in the educational power of technology, became older and wiser in that instant.

If the real world is a butcher, the Internet gives us plastic-wrapped, bloodless, odorless fillets with all the fat trimmed off.

The students at the high school at which I teach have spent three weeks every other year in Peru or Germany—our small size allows us to fundraise effectively so that the whole school can do this.

Travelers to Peru visited Machu Picchu; a women’s shelter in Cuzco, where they made adobe bricks for new construction; and the Waldorf school in Lima. Students got lost and were confronted by armed guards; they got sick and rode in taxis through foreign cities to seek treatment; they helped those who live happy lives that are far different from our lives in the wealthiest nation the world has seen; they formed friendships with those they hope to see again on exchange next year or the year after. Travelers to Germany saw the Bavarian alps, Munich, Salzburg, and Berlin, three centers of world culture that make the oldest buildings in North America look new. They played in the English Garden, saw remnants of the Berlin Wall, and lived and traveled with Germans whom they hope to see again, here or there, in the next few years.

Our students returned full of stories and enthusiasm—all have stories to last a long time. You can imagine it took a couple of days for everyone to settle down to the routine of school. For some, this travel and a view of the world and people outside the United States will change the course of their lives. They will choose different majors in college than they might have done, they will volunteer to help those less privileged, they will travel with confidence, or they will simply conduct themselves with greater empathy and humility. The Internet is a great tool and resource, but there’s no substitute for actual experience.