In Defense of Student Travel

Jenna Cook, Classics

“Now I understand that Rome wasn’t destroyed, it was just built on top of itself,” said a student traveler in a nightly debrief. This student’s key takeaway is a summation of the ancient city that reflects a deep understanding of history, archaeology, and the throughline of the ancient world to modern times. You have to see it to believe it, and once you do, it can reorganize the understanding you have of people, places, dates, and movements as overlapping and continuous. On the Classics Trip, deep learning happens on-site. This kind of learning excels explicit instruction and is built through experience: observation, analysis, and reflection. Although student travel has become more expensive, more logistically challenging, and, without a doubt, more of a risk, the quality of the learning is worth the effort for the students of Milton Academy.

Valid concerns about student travel have raised the question as to whether or not this programming is necessary. Why accept the expense or take on the risk of moving students across international borders just to see some ancient artifacts? Wouldn’t a trip to the MFA in Boston suffice? Though the Greco-Roman collection at the MFA is spectacular, and we are fortunate to be able to use the museum as a classroom, the experience of student travel is about more than just the artifacts.

The Classics Department offers two academic trips, one to Greece and one to Italy, which depart every other spring break. The trip is only a week, but it is packed with site visits, museums, and relevant experiences. Much like the famed DYO of the Science Department at Milton, the itinerary of the trip establishes a procedure for our learning, but the experience of travel is the experiment itself, and as rich as the analysis and conclusions drawn at the end of a lab experience. In the travel lab, one can never be quite sure which enduring understandings the students will bring home with them. We can set a curriculum, but often it is affirmation of the world and one’s place in it that supersedes this content. Navigating the ATAC bus route in Rome at rush hour or ordering a coffee at a busy autogrill off the autostrada, experiences parallel to the planned visits to the Roman Forum or the Capitoline Museum, amplify the learning therein. Reflections in the evening and conversations throughout our trip bring some of this learning to light and help to consolidate key understandings. Nevertheless, some of this learning is invisible to a trip leader: it lives deep in the observations and analysis formed by the student traveler. I trust that it is happening because I, too, have been fortunate enough to learn this way as both a student and lifelong learner.

Concerns about the viability of student travel in the current global climate are not unique to Milton. According to the GEBG 2024-2025 report surveying NAIS and Global Educator Benchmark Group Member Schools, even those schools with distinct global learning programs report challenges in staffing, cost, and risk management. The cost of the 2026 Classics Trip was just shy of double the tuition of a similar itinerary I ran in 2016. In the last ten years, third-party support for trip planning and operations on the ground has become essential for proper risk mitigation for schools without a trained global education staff or administrator, but this level of support can be expensive.

The cost of student travel, whether that be financial cost, assumption of risk, or the time and energy of faculty and administrators, must be tied to the mission-driven priorities of the school in order to maintain programs as rich as the Classics Trip. A commitment to global programming either with in-house or external support will require the investment of the institution to remain feasible in the current environment. The learning that I have observed over spring break confirms that it is worth that investment. Though student travel is one of the many ways in which Milton offers deep learning experiences, in this next phase of strategic planning, global education both on our campus and beyond deserves consideration as essential programming for our school. With a stated investment in global education, we can ensure that Milton student trips are implemented with the proper resources and equivalent level of professional attention and quality as all other areas of school life, while remaining sustainable and viable for the successive generations of student travelers who are curious about their place in the world.