Travel Is Not Education
12th January 2026
Few arguments are as self-evident as this one: To learn about some place, you should travel there; traveling makes you learned, and the learned are well traveled. But as so often with truisms, this is not true. I claim that those who stay at home and occasionally read about foreign places on the internet are better informed than those who go somewhere far away on vacation.
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 to spend as well, but they simply don’t need it to win.
Back in the Good Old Day, when only about 10 percent of the population underwent any schooling, and those were upper class people (or people who wanted to become upper class people) who would have an outsized effect on what direction their society would take, education (in the sense that most humanities professors would use the term) was a good thing. Travel was considered part of that process, certainly in the age of the Grand Tour (which has degenerated into the modern Gap Year). But the advent of pervasive technology and the world that depended on it has converted ‘education’ per say into just a synonym for ‘training’, from which (arguably) more people have the ability to profit.