Tourism is an important and powerful tool to promote national integration and bring people from different parts of the country or subcontinent closer together. The advantages of tourism are remarkable if it is accompanied by education. Traveling is considered as the most pleasant experience in the lives of students. People have enjoyed and learned a lot while traveling on their educational tours. Students eagerly await those kinds of opportunities when they are taken from the four walls of classrooms to distant places. The English consider their education complete only after a tour of the continent.
Geography is considered a very boring and uninspiring subject if you read sitting in classrooms and reading various books. The Great Ganges can be thought of as a line of snakes running across the map. The Taj Mahal can be taken as a monument like many others without visiting it. The boring subject of Geography will definitely become interesting and absorbing once the students visit these places of interest. The story is very boring for the students because they think of it as a story of dead kings and their reign period and that it is not going to pay today’s students anything. However, if students are frequently taken to the sites of glory and defeat, architectural masterpieces built during the periods of these great dead monarchs, the subject of History becomes more interesting and exciting than any other subject.
We can really learn much more when we come into contact with or see such things or sites associated with such events. Sitting at home will only make our perspective narrow. Any student will not be able to understand the effect of the environment on the lives of human beings. In everyday life, reading and gaining theoretical knowledge alone cannot make any student successful. They must know the habits, manners, cultures and way of life of people in other places. Traveling takes students into the realm of practical knowledge. They descend into reality from the realm of dreams and imagination. While traveling, students learn to adapt to changing living conditions and foot habits as well as the environment. The different and varied difficulties encountered during the trip make it easy for students to adapt. As such, tourism provides far more valuable lessons to students than textbook lessons.
There was a time when crossing the seas to acquire higher education was considered a great sacrilege. Foreign travel was discouraged. It was this kind of ostrich mentality that produced the worst kind of intellectual stagnation and caused an ignominious downfall in the country. However, now in free India, students have realized the need to learn more languages and acquire higher education in latest technologies. The last method to learn a new language and understand a different culture is to live and more among the people we want to meet. Learning the Chinese language and culture is better possible by living in China for a short period of time than by taking longer courses at institutions in our country alone. Learning a foreign language is the first step towards understanding a nation. International understanding is possible for students from our country through tour packages around the world.
A student must keep an open eye and mind during educational tours. Tourism provides an experience of the world and calls for action and practical use of various qualities of mind and intellect developed by education. Tact, captivating personality, assertiveness, and lively conversation are some of the byproducts of traveling across the country and the world. A student does not need to initiate the habits, manners, or fashions of other people she visits. Only good and appropriate attitudes should be adopted from others. The student must understand the economic problems that the rural population faces when they go to the villages and see how without adequate schools and hospitals, the people survive. Students can make a decision to serve the poor and innocent people in the villages after completing their studies.
Traveling should be part of the educational system at each level of study. Students will not only become more educated about all walks of life and culture in their country, but will have a liberal outlook. They will have maturity of judgment and clarity in their understanding of people and their minds. Tourism is the fastest and best, if not the cheapest method of learning new things.