Enhanced Learning

Enhanced-learning.org is an online resource devoted to educational and academic subjects. The site is devoted to intellectual pursuits. Trying to analysize information and trying to form theories that can be tested again and again for their veracity is at the heart of the drive to build intellectual models of the world and all that is in the world in order to better understand. I sometimes feel when I’m in the library or at home studying that the models we build are doubly removed from experience – once by the fact that they are models and secondly by the language we use to describe the models.

As well as being an academic by trade I am also an avid traveler. My schedule allows me considerable chunks of time to explore the world. My colleagues stay at home and research new papers tortured by the dictate to publish or perish. I find I get more done if I refresh my mind by immersing it in a new culture and a different type of challenge.

When I travel I take a beat up backpack and a few travellers checks. I don’t bring a guide book, only a phrase book. I never book in advance. I’m not drawn to resorts or ‘luxury destinations’. I have been to Africa, South East Asia, China and South America. I travel as cheaply as possible. I hunt out where the local people eat and I try to engage them in conversation. I make a continual effort to learn the local language. I take local transport and I do my best to not get herded into situations with dozens of others of tourists with their wheelie suitcases. I’ve stayed for free with Berber hilltribes people in Morocco. I’ve spent time in a shack in the Amazon basin in Bolivia. I trekked through the interior of Koh Phangan in Thailand, and found a coconut farmer who let me stay for free in exchange for helping him harvest his coconut crops. The anecdotes go on.

Not all of the stories have been good. I’ve been mugged twice in Brazil. I’ve caught malaria in Malawi. I’ve been threatened with a gun in Cambodia. None of these experiences were pleasant. But I’ve got back on the horse.

Traveling does more than just broaden the mind. It brings home the fact that most people in the world are poor. By that I mean poorer than Americans, Europeans, Australians etc. Their life expectations and their lifestyles are radically different to those people I encounter in the USA. The simple problems of getting food, shelter and clean water are ever looming. It is impossible to talk about the poor majority in the world without patronizing them or sterotyping them. The efforts of charity often do both.

Academic learning can only take us so far. We have to experience the real world outside of our rarefied white towers to gain a better perspective of what we are trying to achieve, to realize how we speak to and for only a minority. There are no words that can describe the injustice of a global system that keeps the mass of mankind at a level of existence not much more advanced than was common hundreds of years ago.