Day 21 sped me right back past the Daytona International Speedway and up the beautiful coastal highway 1A, which hugs the eastern Florida beachfront.  It was not the most direct nor efficient route to Palm Coast FL…but it is the most scenic! 

After a day of pleasant riding, punctuated by chatting about education with some really interesting folks at Starbucks (while squatting for free wifi...that my $6 coffee actually more than paid for), I pulled into Chuck and Debbie’s driveway.  They had a most tasty sausage pasta dinner waiting.  Yum!

Only a month into Education Ride 365 I have met so many interesting people and seen so many interesting places.  It matches my experience in life----> travel is perhaps the best education.  Authentic travel, beyond the bounds of the resort experience, exposes one to life lessons nearly impossible to appreciate by any other means.  Getting out of your element, relatively immersed in the places and culture others know like you know your own, reminds you…if only subconsciously…how little any one person can ever truly know and how stimulating it is to learn new things through direct experience. 

This is a necessarily incomplete attempt at an answer to a recent comment posted by a reader of this blog:

It seems that you find a lot of educators who travel. And a lot of people talk about the educational value of travel. You might think of travel as education without a curriculum. So why is it such an important source of learning? Is curriculum overrated?

I believe most educators love to travel because they are…at heart…lifelong learners.  They value all learning, every day.  They have inquisitive minds and tend to have introspective characters.   They are not content with what they know.  They want to know ever more, to experience more, to understand more.  There is no doubt that we learn from everyday experiences.  We learn from books.  We learn from others…including those we interact with daily.  We even learn from television.  I genuinely believe, though, that we learn most from the novel.  Not the literary product we call a novel…rather the authentic, original experiences that are so commonly encountered when we travel. 

Curriculum offers a structure for our learning.  It puts some bounds on the boundless nature of what there is to learn in life.  It is an attempt to delineate what is most important to understand in order to be properly equipped for the life path we are likely to follow.  In a sense, it is necessarily limiting…or at least finite.

Travel is unpredictable and eye opening.  It offers opportunities to explore beyond our bounds.  It can help one begin to understand what before seemed incomprehensible and foreign enough to be inaccessible in any truly meaningful way.  It can expand ones’ sense of what is important in life and what is important to understand about the lives of others.  It is an educational experience of infinite possibilities.

Yet, curriculum is as indispensable to a well-rounded education as travel is…though travel may be more profoundly enriching.  In my opinion, both are essential to a quality education.  Unfortunately, some young people never really experience travel.  Even more unfortunately---since it truly is foundational---many young people are never really exposed to quality curriculum.   It is my strong belief that a good measure of each, in quality form, produces students best prepared for the global nature of our 21st century world!

Riding stats--- Day 21: 112.1 miles traveled, 3 hours and 56 minutes of moving time, 7 hours and 18 minutes of stopped time, 28.4 miles per hour average moving time, 10 miles per hour overall average, and a max speed of 82.3 miles per hour.   Day 22: 85.5 miles traveled, 1 hours and 55 minutes of moving time, 1 hour and 29 minutes of stopped time, 44.2 miles per hour average moving time, 24.9 miles per hour overall average, and a max speed of 85.5 miles per hour.