The World Is Our Classroom

How travelling the world allows new ways to educate children and perform family life on the move

A growing number of families are selling their houses, quitting their jobs, and taking their children out of traditional school settings to educate them while traveling the globe. In The World is Our Classroom, Jennie Germann Molz explores the hopes and anxieties that drive these parents and children to leave their comfortable lives behind out of a desire to live the “good life” on the move.

Drawing on interviews with parents and stories from the blogs they publish during their journeys, as well as her own experience traveling the world with her ten-year-old son, Germann Molz takes us inside a fascinating life spent on trains, boats, and planes. She shows why many parents—disillusioned with standard public schooling—believe the world is a child’s best classroom. Rebelling against convention, these parents combine technology and travel to pursue a different version of the good life, one in which parents can work remotely as “digital nomads,” participate in like-minded communities online, and expose their children to the risks, opportunities, and life lessons that the world has to offer.

Ultimately, Germann Molz sheds light on the emerging phenomenon of “worldschooling,” showing that it is not just an alternative way to educate children, but an altogether new kind of mobile lifestyle. The World is Our Classroom paints an extreme portrait of twenty-first century parenting and some families’ attempts to raise global citizens prepared to thrive in the uncertain world of tomorrow.

Jennie Germann Molz is Professor of Sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts where she teaches courses on social theory, travel and tourism, mobile technologies, global citizenship, and emotion. She is interested in questions of identity, belonging, and ethics in the context of mobile togetherness and has conducted pioneering research on round-the-world backpackers, travel blogging, food mobilities, network hospitality and the sharing economy, family voluntourism, family mobilities, and worldschooling. Her books include Travel Connections: Tourism, Technology and Togetherness in a Mobile World (2012), Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests: Alternative Ontologies for Future Hospitalities (2014), and Mobilizing Hospitality: The Ethics of Social Relations in a Mobile World (2007). In addition, she has published more than two dozen journal articles and book chapters. Since 2011, she has been a co-editor of the journal Hospitality & Society. She received her PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University, where she subsequently held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Centre for Mobilities Research. In 2013, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lapland’s Multidimensional Tourism Institute in Rovaniemi, Finland. She has taught at Holy Cross since 2007.Jennie Germann Molz is Professor of Sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts where she teaches courses on social theory, travel and tourism, mobile technologies, global citizenship, and emotion. She is interested in questions of identity, belonging, and ethics in the context of mobile togetherness and has conducted pioneering research on round-the-world backpackers, travel blogging, food mobilities, network hospitality and the sharing economy, family voluntourism, family mobilities, and worldschooling. Her books include Travel Connections: Tourism, Technology and Togetherness in a Mobile World (2012), Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests: Alternative Ontologies for Future Hospitalities (2014), and Mobilizing Hospitality: The Ethics of Social Relations in a Mobile World (2007). In addition, she has published more than two dozen journal articles and book chapters. Since 2011, she has been a co-editor of the journal Hospitality & Society. She received her PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University, where she subsequently held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Centre for Mobilities Research. In 2013, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lapland’s Multidimensional Tourism Institute in Rovaniemi, Finland. She has taught at Holy Cross since 2007.

Gayle Kaufman, author of Fixing Parental Leave: The Six Month Solution:
The World Is Our Classroom provides the first comprehensive examination of worldschooling families. This whirlwind of a book takes the reader on a journey through the lives of worldschooling families from Argentina to Thailand. With the use of mobile virtual ethnography, Germann Molz provides detailed insight into worldschooling as a way of life that emphasizes risk taking, resilience, and ultimately family as parents prepare their kids to be “future-proof” global citizens at the same time as holding family very close. Anyone interested in education, families, globalization, technology, or just a good read should pick up this book.

Amy L. Best, author of Fast Food Kids: French Fries, Lunch Lines, and Social Ties:
The World Is Our Classroom goes the distance, literally. It is a marvelous book. From it, we learn why families are willing to shrug off the conventions of a tethered existence orbiting around home and school and instead forge global identities as they bring far -flung places within their reach. These worldschoolers embrace the idea of travel as education and lifestyle. They travel to parts unknown, imparting skills and sensibilities to their children that offer big dividends for an uncertain future world. Molz offers us good tools to think with, helping us to see up close how modern families navigate a world rattled by economic and social precarity and risk. She reminds us this is a world we must all weather, however. Though their mobile existence is not without emotional and social costs for them, worldschoolers are rich in resources, able to traverse a world in flux, the same world that leaves untold numbers of families insecure and largely left behind.