Cite as Paradis, A.T. (2021). Harnessing the curiosity of rich people's children: International travel as a tool for anti-oppressive education. In K. Swalwell & D.Spikes (Eds.) Anti-Oppressive Education in "Elite" Schools: Promising Practices & Cautionary Tales from the Field. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Retrieved at
I was an unlikely founder for a travel company servicing privileged American teenagers. I had no formal business education background. I grew up in 1970’s post-Vietnam War-era poverty, the eldest daughter of a disabled, Caribbean immigrant who became stigmatized as a “welfare mom” following divorce. We were occasionally homeless, living out of our Volkswagen van. I learned a great deal about Reaganomics personal sufficiency myths, and the importance of ethical living to survive misfortune. Smart, determined and self-supporting, I excelled through college and law school, pivoted from a legal aid career, and fell in love with teaching teens at an exclusive private high school. As a mixed-race person “passing for white,” I managed to imbue my courses with social justice themes that, a supportive celebrity dad once told me, “You can get away with teaching this ‘radical stuff’ because you don’t look Black.”
After fifteen years as an inspirational history teacher in one of California’s richest communities, I grew to understand the psychological aspirations of wealthy parents. Sending their kids on expensive, short-term, faculty-led, educational trips would “open their minds,” “show them how good they have it” and also “be great for college apps.” As their teacher, my motivations were loftier: I wanted these privileged youth—future senators, C-level executives, investors, inheritors of fortune—to make a soulful connection to people living with the legacy of poverty and conflict. I wanted this radical empathy to inform their professional and financial decisions as influential adults. Firsthand experiences, adventuring with heart, heightened consciousness of the global “Other” acquired by an adolescent—these activities, I am still convinced, concretize radical empathy and can help save the world from industrialized violence.
I started an educational travel company, Peace Works Travel (peaceworkstravel.com) to provide social-justice-minded, experiential education through ethical adventure. Not merely a “trip,” the program included remote pre-departure learning to ensure students know the basic significant relevancies of our destinations. Our People’s History of the United States, Howard-Zinn-style curriculum continues throughout the travel experience and is designed to balance the standard inquiry of iconic places, elevating the voices often left out of the traditional narrative. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Rwanda, Guatemala, Washington D.C., Chicago, the American Southwest, the U.S.-Mexico Border are rich with lessons in the resiliency of the human spirit to resist unthinkable oppression. Itineraries are mindful, balancing the “darkness and light” of a place, always emphasizing how students have power as Americans to make positive change.1
Why take rich kids on socially conscious trips? Our premise: wealthy teenagers can become ethically engaged global citizens through experiential learning. Critics on the Left and Right express contrary opinions about the merits. What kinds of criticisms? On the Right, vehement accusations of “socialist youth indoctrination” from influential parents once pressured client schools in Florida against booking our programs in Cuba. On the Left, righteous insistence that short-term travel to developing communities is in effect “poverty porn” that fosters “white saviorism and imperialist thinking.” While it is true that not all motives for social justice travel may be authenticated as longitudinally altruistic, many socially conscious travel programs attract teachers and students who share that goal. Peace Works Travel approach focused on critical understanding of, in the big picture, the military industrial complex. As American consumers, do we want to feed a system which profiteers on the Global South? How will fostering a true curiosity for the human impact of U.S foreign and domestic policy allow young people to be more effective in the world? Asked differently: What is a wealthy child to “acquire” upon a deep dive into the ugly underbelly of American exceptionalism, greed, and the will to power?
Through active engagement with people adversely affected by U.S. policies—current and contemporary—our travelers ultimately understood three distinct but related facts: 1) As people who suffer the negative impact of U.S. policy primarily lack the means to redress injustice, it is our responsibility to know and care about this; 2) Young people can help to create peace by taking action now and taking lessons to the future; and 3) Privileged student travel provides sustainable support for ethical NGOs around the world. Using the travel experience to create radical empathy in privileged young people is, of course, irrefutably fraught. Risky. Laborious. And not for the reasons one might think.
The traditional model of elite education is nakedly transactional. Students “do X for points.” This, then, translates into systems of GPAs and athletics and scores. The reward is access to institutions of higher learning, and eventually, prestigious employment. Over the long term, the purpose and expense of elite education thereby becomes less about skills mastery and applied intelligence than about social currency. Elective educational travel experiences disrupt the traditional dispensation of knowledge. A student actively chooses to travel and seek new empirical evidence for their worldview. Contrasted with the passive acceptance of a standard annual curriculum, the demand for real world applied learning is student-driven. Along the K-12 trajectory, young people—born naturally compassionate—are open to experiences of the heart. Many are very aware of how lucky they are. Inspired by teachers who pursue adventurous modalities of learning, authentic student interest travel experiences create an opportunity. Teacher chaperones who want to experience transformative learning with the students together supply the labor. Authentic student curiosity thus fuels the market demand for socially conscious travel.
At the intersection of risk management, “urban wilderness with handrails” we are walking the line between making the experience judiciously “safe” for the students and respecting local practices. While we navigate relationships that foster effective cross-cultural connection for mutual benefit, we must proceed with mindfulness of the supposed “gain” for others. Along the Mekong Delta, the bicycle ride with local students in a lively cultural exchange is extraordinarily heart opening. The connections transcend the moment, with Vietnamese and U.S. kids in joyful friendships that live on through social media across the Pacific Ocean. It’s a connection unthinkable to the ancestors of these nations, those who once fought and killed one another in what they refer to as the “American War.” At home, in parent meetings disclosing all of our traveling activities, questions arise: “How safe are those bicycles? Do all students wear helmets? What accommodations are there for students who cannot ride bicycles?” These kinds of questions force the navigation of balancing acts. Our partners may not want their communities littered with (what will become) non-recyclable broken bicycle helmets. It is made politely clear to us that some of our Mekong Delta friends may resent bicycle helmet introduction. Why are the American teenagers more precious than the Vietnamese teens? On balance, we teachers choose safety over cultural offense: shipping 50 bicycle helmets to this community for imposition of our standards.
Cross cultural engagement is a weighing of interests, concerns. It’s a dynamic process: shifting the priorities throughout the travel experience. I’m reminded of a poignant moment on our Crossing Borders program in Tijuana, attending to a student who was feeling “triggered” by serving people at a refugee soup kitchen. The teenager literally couldn’t handle “smelling poverty” up close. She requested chaperone supervision elsewhere so she could take a break and process her emotional disequilibrium, though our shift serving food was nowhere near complete. Accommodating the American teen’s emotional preferences, in that moment, would be an absurd allocation of resources. I said no: she needed to finish the 90 minutes. “Take a seat in the corner. Keep your mind open to what’s happening here.” Privately, our NGO partner remarked: “When we talk about marginalized communities, the purpose of these travel programs is to bring the people who exist on the sidelines into the center.” She took my wrist, turned my hand upwards and pressed into the center of my palm, my fingers instinctually cupping to create a vessel. She continued. “Learning from desperate people who live on the fringe, means being present to their pain. And, honestly? The upset the rich kids might feel in here is not my primary concern. I care about the hungry.”
On balance, most social activists enjoy building relationships with elite students who—let’s name it—can end the suffering of hundreds with the swift intersection of a caring heart and easy access to wealth. Could that positive community change occur between Laotian cluster bomb survivors and privileged teenagers on a spontaneous Mekong Delta bike ride? It can, and it has, and it will again. In this way, we’ve generated funding for professional landmine clearing from countless hectares, rendering agricultural land productive after decades of random, injurious detonations. The benefits, as all stakeholders can attest, outweigh the costs.
The challenge of experiencing beautiful places with eyes open to social inequities requires trust and fortitude. Our work is to harness the edge of elite travelers’ culture shock for good. The lines here are delicate. To be clear: students with demonstrated history of mental fragility ought not travel as such. But the elite students we serve have different issues: they have been emotionally insulated from the cost of their privilege. The human capital, resource acquisition supply chain, the U.S.-led militarism and environmental degradation which has afforded their comfortable existence is primarily invisible to them. The kids who self-select to travel with us suspect this to be true. Regardless, they want to go and see the world—warts and all—for themselves.
As Jean Theoharis (2018) brilliantly articulates in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, we must, “encourage young people to identify with those who challenge the status quo to fight for justice, not simply to emulate and celebrate the rich and powerful” (p.17). Framing civil rights education and justice struggles as something of “the past” allows us to ignore a national reckoning with contemporary inequality requiring redress. Systematized injustice is outsourced globally, and the poor are compelled to bear a disproportionate burden. Socially conscious student travel which highlights inequity necessarily fosters an awareness of one’s own opportunity to make change.
Upon connecting, meaningfully, with the people in a given place, students can shift consciousness. What happens when we show students sweatshop textile factories and acres of imported plastic garbage that the Cambodians recently stopped purchasing from U.S. waste management companies? The intersection of love for the Khmer people they’ve befriended, and personal awareness of their role as consumers compels a change in behavior. Use less. Need less. Help more. Armies of student travelers taking immediate social action upon return home is not the lone metric of success. Rather, it’s the opening of possibilities to perceive others still fighting for basic human dignity with more nuanced appreciation. These lessons evolve over time into the future as young people more readily perceive someone else’s reality. In this way, students can establish a shared purpose with others who demand that the United States live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all.
______________________________
Interview with Alethea Tyner Paradis
Katy: What does it mean to engage young people with incredible economic, racial, national privilege to be connected to the world—and what role does travel play in that?
Alethea: Yeah—what does it mean to connect wealthy kids to the developing world and capitalism and the military industrial complex and the generational privilege and accumulation of wealth, the exploitation of Black and Brown people and the extraction of resources, and tie that to our foreign policy and the imperialism where we create a constant demand for our weaponry and defense budget as it plays out on the landscape of the world over time in different places? There’s Vietnam and Guatemala and the Philippines and Cuba and the “duty to not engage” in Rwanda. Rather than engage a kid in a very dry research paper using primary sources from a FOIA request, they’re experiencing in all their senses on the ground and I’m narrating it at the same time--they get it. They’re getting it kinesthetically and in the heart. Teenagers in private schools, they’re just young people with no other input except for their lived experience. Once you open their eyes and show them things and ask if it’s fair and what do they see governing all the structures they inhabit—that curiosity and spark when they're like, “Oh my God, I need to know more”—that’s universal. Compassion is a universal thing in kids that can be squashed out, of course. But, if exposed to ideas early in life and really tenderly—if you can have a muscle memory of radical empathy and recognize how we’re all connected and tie it all together? Then, wow, your choices as a consumer or investor or sitting on a board or writing legislation will be changed. I see these kids emerging into those positions of authority and if you can catch them when they are young, you can put an ethic of care into their heads which may inform how they will react to any given chance to benefit from exploiting others. Wealthy teenagers are likely growing into a position of privilege where they’re going to have to exercise moral calculus and decide what matters: whether it’s about their acquisition of more wealth or about the good of the collective. In an economy like ours, it’s hard to see that because it’s too easy to be siloed, looking only at how your investments grow. But are they growing because the companies are exploiting Black and Brown people all over the world? We can’t be so many degrees removed from our money and human suffering—if maximizing profit is the lone good of our human existence, then we’re on a death course. I don’t think that’s what human beings want or what parents want for their children—a mother doesn’t want a dead future for her child. The scale is too big to not give a shit about how your personal behaviors affect the whole. It’s either that or we die.
Katy: I hear you talking about having kids care about those connections and develop community relationships and a sense of obligation that cuts through abstraction. That’s a beautiful goal. I think the bitter irony is how much of their education is at odds with that.
Alethea: Oh, 100%. Because it’s set up to be competitive and the capitalistic consumptive idea that education is transactional and you’ll do something and get points.
Katy: So you have this lofty ideal that motivates you and appeals to families and kids. But participation in a program like this is a way to distinguish themselves in the market, and that sits in tension with the goal you just outlined. Can you talk about how you navigate that?
Alethea: It’s a great question. I have struggled with harboring some middle-class judgment about some of the families who seem so thoroughly out of touch with the 99%. I have a story that sits in my head, just to give you a picture. In 2018, while President Trump is issuing Executive Orders against immigrants, travel bans, wall construction, and preventing refugees from requesting asylum on our southern border, California is battling the record-breaking Thomas Fire and a mudslide that killed 23 people. The timing coincides with a “pre-departure party” for an upcoming student trip to Tijuana to examine what’s happening with Trump’s new nativism. Coming from Santa Barbara, I literally drive on freeways through flames, thick smoke, and traffic jams of people fleeing to arrive in Brentwood. This is where the meeting is being hosted for 30+ people by the generous family of a student traveler. The dad CEO and the mother are very hospitable: their home is palatial—and the Latina housekeepers are serving the Mexican-themed food for the guests. It is over 85 degrees and we literally drove through fire to get there, but—and this is like a scene out of some LA sardonic comedy—because it’s December, the hostess had trucked in several tons of actual mountain snow to make it feel more festive. The hostess kept apologizing that the snow wasn’t right: “It’s melting and looks like old oatmeal. I’m so sorry!” This display of luxury is the realm of their lived experience. Yet all these kids in attendance at this party are going to Mexico to meet refugee communities. The tension between these things--it’s so weird. And too many parents want me to know that they aren’t like “the other mothers” who are “too afraid to send their kids on a trip to Tijuana.” The virtue signaling for the parents in their own sub-communities—it’s almost comedic. So, there are simultaneous forces at play: genuine concern and appalling decadence. My feeling is to harness the mothers who are vaguely aware of the belief that insular self-perpetuating privilege is not good for young people. There is an awareness that someday the kid is going to inherit all this money and hopefully says, “Fuck it. I’m going to fight for a better world instead.” For me, personally—I know this population of kids can be reached. I totally dispute this reductionist view that traveling somewhere with them is wrong. There are intrinsic downsides and risks—you risk doing a caricature of a place if you don’t experience it “properly.” But kids who self-select for ethical educational travel and parents who pay for it? There’s something there to work with.
Katy: What does Peace Works do to make the travel “proper”? How do you keep it from getting gross?
Alethea: The first couple trips I did were gross. I’ll just start there. I began traveling with kids in the late 1990’s, then it became an industry saturated with well-meaning white women trying to “save Africa.” There is the do-gooderism and voluntourism with the idea that you can go somewhere and “do something” and make things better, which is harnessing the disequilibrium we have as people who “have so much” for people who “have so little.” The counterpoint to that ugliness is to consistently ask, “How can we center the place that we are visiting?” It’s a practice which begins in the building of ethical partnerships. There are checklists we follow, guidelines for how to tread lightly, make a positive impact with our presence. Many of these ideas are derived from principles of Learning Service (http://learningservice.info/). Are the locals benefiting from this interaction? Are we patronizing locally-owned businesses? Are we encouraging our students to mitigate the harm of their consumption while in-country? In order for the trip to not be a superficial, tourist thing we have to build relationships with everybody along the supply chain who are going to help the kids—bus drivers, home-stay families, restaurateurs, non-profits, and the like. That means fair pricing and making sure that there are positive, mutually beneficial relationships with everyone. The truth is—I think critics of this kind of travel have some righteous indignation. Their position is that the only way to visit a place is to learn the language and stay long enough to meld into the community and be an anthropologist. But I disagree. That approach is not what is helpful to support communities on a scale that they can sustain. The idea that the locals just want us to buy stuff in the handicrafts gift shop and don’t want to put energy into designing a day of student activities together—I respect that a lot. We teach kids these dynamics and how to be reflective about being in a unique community space and how we’re seen by local people. Conducting that self-reflective exercise with students, which deals with ethnocentrism, helps kids unpack and be self-aware. We are choosing to work with partners who understand the community on multiple levels and will tell us, “You know what? I know you want a picture riding atop an elephant, but I’m going to tell you all the reasons we’re not going to do that.” They really serve as firm ambassadors of representing what’s okay and what’s not and why.
Katy: What have you found are powerful ways to facilitate that reflection away from reinforcing white saviorism or “benevolent elitism”?
Alethea: There isn’t a failsafe guarantee against that because you can’t screen all travelers for motive. We do try. Sometimes you can get a hint that some kids who want to go on our trips are motivated just to confirm some preconceived idea. They aren’t interested in doing deep, personal work. Yet, that child may grow to do more for the world given the chance to expand. The way we’re daily reflecting and the pre-learning they do about foreign policy through a critical human geography lens—that’s where framing comes into play. A student needs to be open to learning factual information which may conflict with their closely held identity and worldview as a person of privilege. Americans are amnesiac and it’s too easy for us to attribute cause and effect for complex historical things to more recent developments. Oftentimes those simplistic assessments are racist, blaming people for their circumstances. That kind of thinking tends to reinforce ideas of “American exceptionalism,” tenets of rapacious global capitalism. We want to think of our privilege as virtuously earned and justifiable. I think the way we get around white saviorism is by showing them the complexity of systems which create poverty and reinforces hierarchies. We’re honest with them about the exercise of global power by the “More Developed Countries” at the expense of “Less Developed Countries.” Part of this involves the candid and shocking exposure to how inhumane our foreign policy has been to most people in our destinations. Look at the militarism, look at the carnage, the deprivation—all of this imposed upon people and places precious to the global community. We look at it on so many levels to harness students’ natural compassion and sensory cognition. Imagine, the heart-opening of knowing how beautiful the people and places are while knowing what the U.S. did to the ancestors of our living friends there. In some cases, this is the first time students have learned how U.S. policy played out on the ground.
Katy: What are the short-term or long-term indicators that make you glad a kid traveled?
Alethea: It’s a longitudinal hope. In the short term, we ask students to write reflections which ask them to self-report indicators on civic engagement. The self-reporting data is positive, of course. But longitudinally, over twenty years, a lot of it is anecdotal. For example, there was a teenager who was very pro Iraq War following 9/11. He traveled with us to Vietnam, studied the case of John McCain and how international law is designed to protect captured enemies. It was his first exposure to the double-edged sword of war crimes. This young man was so stunned by this experience while traveling, he decided to pursue his education in military sciences. Years later, his career placed him in a position of being a low-profile whistleblower for Guantánamo. He remarked to me about the question of whether or not to stay silent after witnessing an abuse of military power: “Absolutely not. I remember John McCain’s holding cell in Hanoi. It was chilling. We have to make the rule of law mean something for everyone.” It’s that moment when someone steps up and embraces what they were exposed to. While not all former travelers can draw as direct, dramatic a line between their experiential learning outcome as this example, logic suggests that truism of the Holmesian concept: a mind and heart once “opened never regains its previous dimensions.”
Katy: All of education is never knowing when and where the experiences that kids have are going to activate for them in particular ways.
Alethea: Right. I am a hope-aholic. The abstraction of this work—the criticisms of travel designed for elite children aren’t wrong. Those inquiries help us be mindful about how we do this work, to consistently make sure we’re being honest, and weighing the ethics of all our choices. I just think there are ways to harness the curiosity of rich people’s children and that is a long-term good thing.
Katy: I’m a hope-aholic, too. There’s always that tension between the ideal and real and we need people on both sides moving things forward.
Alethea: And these kids are going to travel, so would you rather they go from the airport to the Ritz Carlton? Or from the airport to a homestay where they can learn how to prepare regional cuisine and hear stories from the matriarchs about life is in this beautiful place over time? Those kids are going to travel—let’s capture that demand and give it an ethical supply. The possibility to not raise our world’s children with consciousness for one another? It isn’t an option.
REFERENCES
Theoharis, J. (2018). A more beautiful and terrible history: The uses and misuses of civil rights history. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
ENDNOTES
1 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwdzCQhWvy4&feature=emb_logo for a video highlighting a Peace Works trip to Vietnam.
After fifteen years as an inspirational history teacher in one of California’s richest communities, I grew to understand the psychological aspirations of wealthy parents. Sending their kids on expensive, short-term, faculty-led, educational trips would “open their minds,” “show them how good they have it” and also “be great for college apps.” As their teacher, my motivations were loftier: I wanted these privileged youth—future senators, C-level executives, investors, inheritors of fortune—to make a soulful connection to people living with the legacy of poverty and conflict. I wanted this radical empathy to inform their professional and financial decisions as influential adults. Firsthand experiences, adventuring with heart, heightened consciousness of the global “Other” acquired by an adolescent—these activities, I am still convinced, concretize radical empathy and can help save the world from industrialized violence.
I started an educational travel company, Peace Works Travel (peaceworkstravel.com) to provide social-justice-minded, experiential education through ethical adventure. Not merely a “trip,” the program included remote pre-departure learning to ensure students know the basic significant relevancies of our destinations. Our People’s History of the United States, Howard-Zinn-style curriculum continues throughout the travel experience and is designed to balance the standard inquiry of iconic places, elevating the voices often left out of the traditional narrative. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Rwanda, Guatemala, Washington D.C., Chicago, the American Southwest, the U.S.-Mexico Border are rich with lessons in the resiliency of the human spirit to resist unthinkable oppression. Itineraries are mindful, balancing the “darkness and light” of a place, always emphasizing how students have power as Americans to make positive change.1
Why take rich kids on socially conscious trips? Our premise: wealthy teenagers can become ethically engaged global citizens through experiential learning. Critics on the Left and Right express contrary opinions about the merits. What kinds of criticisms? On the Right, vehement accusations of “socialist youth indoctrination” from influential parents once pressured client schools in Florida against booking our programs in Cuba. On the Left, righteous insistence that short-term travel to developing communities is in effect “poverty porn” that fosters “white saviorism and imperialist thinking.” While it is true that not all motives for social justice travel may be authenticated as longitudinally altruistic, many socially conscious travel programs attract teachers and students who share that goal. Peace Works Travel approach focused on critical understanding of, in the big picture, the military industrial complex. As American consumers, do we want to feed a system which profiteers on the Global South? How will fostering a true curiosity for the human impact of U.S foreign and domestic policy allow young people to be more effective in the world? Asked differently: What is a wealthy child to “acquire” upon a deep dive into the ugly underbelly of American exceptionalism, greed, and the will to power?
Through active engagement with people adversely affected by U.S. policies—current and contemporary—our travelers ultimately understood three distinct but related facts: 1) As people who suffer the negative impact of U.S. policy primarily lack the means to redress injustice, it is our responsibility to know and care about this; 2) Young people can help to create peace by taking action now and taking lessons to the future; and 3) Privileged student travel provides sustainable support for ethical NGOs around the world. Using the travel experience to create radical empathy in privileged young people is, of course, irrefutably fraught. Risky. Laborious. And not for the reasons one might think.
The traditional model of elite education is nakedly transactional. Students “do X for points.” This, then, translates into systems of GPAs and athletics and scores. The reward is access to institutions of higher learning, and eventually, prestigious employment. Over the long term, the purpose and expense of elite education thereby becomes less about skills mastery and applied intelligence than about social currency. Elective educational travel experiences disrupt the traditional dispensation of knowledge. A student actively chooses to travel and seek new empirical evidence for their worldview. Contrasted with the passive acceptance of a standard annual curriculum, the demand for real world applied learning is student-driven. Along the K-12 trajectory, young people—born naturally compassionate—are open to experiences of the heart. Many are very aware of how lucky they are. Inspired by teachers who pursue adventurous modalities of learning, authentic student interest travel experiences create an opportunity. Teacher chaperones who want to experience transformative learning with the students together supply the labor. Authentic student curiosity thus fuels the market demand for socially conscious travel.
At the intersection of risk management, “urban wilderness with handrails” we are walking the line between making the experience judiciously “safe” for the students and respecting local practices. While we navigate relationships that foster effective cross-cultural connection for mutual benefit, we must proceed with mindfulness of the supposed “gain” for others. Along the Mekong Delta, the bicycle ride with local students in a lively cultural exchange is extraordinarily heart opening. The connections transcend the moment, with Vietnamese and U.S. kids in joyful friendships that live on through social media across the Pacific Ocean. It’s a connection unthinkable to the ancestors of these nations, those who once fought and killed one another in what they refer to as the “American War.” At home, in parent meetings disclosing all of our traveling activities, questions arise: “How safe are those bicycles? Do all students wear helmets? What accommodations are there for students who cannot ride bicycles?” These kinds of questions force the navigation of balancing acts. Our partners may not want their communities littered with (what will become) non-recyclable broken bicycle helmets. It is made politely clear to us that some of our Mekong Delta friends may resent bicycle helmet introduction. Why are the American teenagers more precious than the Vietnamese teens? On balance, we teachers choose safety over cultural offense: shipping 50 bicycle helmets to this community for imposition of our standards.
Cross cultural engagement is a weighing of interests, concerns. It’s a dynamic process: shifting the priorities throughout the travel experience. I’m reminded of a poignant moment on our Crossing Borders program in Tijuana, attending to a student who was feeling “triggered” by serving people at a refugee soup kitchen. The teenager literally couldn’t handle “smelling poverty” up close. She requested chaperone supervision elsewhere so she could take a break and process her emotional disequilibrium, though our shift serving food was nowhere near complete. Accommodating the American teen’s emotional preferences, in that moment, would be an absurd allocation of resources. I said no: she needed to finish the 90 minutes. “Take a seat in the corner. Keep your mind open to what’s happening here.” Privately, our NGO partner remarked: “When we talk about marginalized communities, the purpose of these travel programs is to bring the people who exist on the sidelines into the center.” She took my wrist, turned my hand upwards and pressed into the center of my palm, my fingers instinctually cupping to create a vessel. She continued. “Learning from desperate people who live on the fringe, means being present to their pain. And, honestly? The upset the rich kids might feel in here is not my primary concern. I care about the hungry.”
On balance, most social activists enjoy building relationships with elite students who—let’s name it—can end the suffering of hundreds with the swift intersection of a caring heart and easy access to wealth. Could that positive community change occur between Laotian cluster bomb survivors and privileged teenagers on a spontaneous Mekong Delta bike ride? It can, and it has, and it will again. In this way, we’ve generated funding for professional landmine clearing from countless hectares, rendering agricultural land productive after decades of random, injurious detonations. The benefits, as all stakeholders can attest, outweigh the costs.
The challenge of experiencing beautiful places with eyes open to social inequities requires trust and fortitude. Our work is to harness the edge of elite travelers’ culture shock for good. The lines here are delicate. To be clear: students with demonstrated history of mental fragility ought not travel as such. But the elite students we serve have different issues: they have been emotionally insulated from the cost of their privilege. The human capital, resource acquisition supply chain, the U.S.-led militarism and environmental degradation which has afforded their comfortable existence is primarily invisible to them. The kids who self-select to travel with us suspect this to be true. Regardless, they want to go and see the world—warts and all—for themselves.
As Jean Theoharis (2018) brilliantly articulates in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, we must, “encourage young people to identify with those who challenge the status quo to fight for justice, not simply to emulate and celebrate the rich and powerful” (p.17). Framing civil rights education and justice struggles as something of “the past” allows us to ignore a national reckoning with contemporary inequality requiring redress. Systematized injustice is outsourced globally, and the poor are compelled to bear a disproportionate burden. Socially conscious student travel which highlights inequity necessarily fosters an awareness of one’s own opportunity to make change.
Upon connecting, meaningfully, with the people in a given place, students can shift consciousness. What happens when we show students sweatshop textile factories and acres of imported plastic garbage that the Cambodians recently stopped purchasing from U.S. waste management companies? The intersection of love for the Khmer people they’ve befriended, and personal awareness of their role as consumers compels a change in behavior. Use less. Need less. Help more. Armies of student travelers taking immediate social action upon return home is not the lone metric of success. Rather, it’s the opening of possibilities to perceive others still fighting for basic human dignity with more nuanced appreciation. These lessons evolve over time into the future as young people more readily perceive someone else’s reality. In this way, students can establish a shared purpose with others who demand that the United States live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all.
______________________________
Interview with Alethea Tyner Paradis
Katy: What does it mean to engage young people with incredible economic, racial, national privilege to be connected to the world—and what role does travel play in that?
Alethea: Yeah—what does it mean to connect wealthy kids to the developing world and capitalism and the military industrial complex and the generational privilege and accumulation of wealth, the exploitation of Black and Brown people and the extraction of resources, and tie that to our foreign policy and the imperialism where we create a constant demand for our weaponry and defense budget as it plays out on the landscape of the world over time in different places? There’s Vietnam and Guatemala and the Philippines and Cuba and the “duty to not engage” in Rwanda. Rather than engage a kid in a very dry research paper using primary sources from a FOIA request, they’re experiencing in all their senses on the ground and I’m narrating it at the same time--they get it. They’re getting it kinesthetically and in the heart. Teenagers in private schools, they’re just young people with no other input except for their lived experience. Once you open their eyes and show them things and ask if it’s fair and what do they see governing all the structures they inhabit—that curiosity and spark when they're like, “Oh my God, I need to know more”—that’s universal. Compassion is a universal thing in kids that can be squashed out, of course. But, if exposed to ideas early in life and really tenderly—if you can have a muscle memory of radical empathy and recognize how we’re all connected and tie it all together? Then, wow, your choices as a consumer or investor or sitting on a board or writing legislation will be changed. I see these kids emerging into those positions of authority and if you can catch them when they are young, you can put an ethic of care into their heads which may inform how they will react to any given chance to benefit from exploiting others. Wealthy teenagers are likely growing into a position of privilege where they’re going to have to exercise moral calculus and decide what matters: whether it’s about their acquisition of more wealth or about the good of the collective. In an economy like ours, it’s hard to see that because it’s too easy to be siloed, looking only at how your investments grow. But are they growing because the companies are exploiting Black and Brown people all over the world? We can’t be so many degrees removed from our money and human suffering—if maximizing profit is the lone good of our human existence, then we’re on a death course. I don’t think that’s what human beings want or what parents want for their children—a mother doesn’t want a dead future for her child. The scale is too big to not give a shit about how your personal behaviors affect the whole. It’s either that or we die.
Katy: I hear you talking about having kids care about those connections and develop community relationships and a sense of obligation that cuts through abstraction. That’s a beautiful goal. I think the bitter irony is how much of their education is at odds with that.
Alethea: Oh, 100%. Because it’s set up to be competitive and the capitalistic consumptive idea that education is transactional and you’ll do something and get points.
Katy: So you have this lofty ideal that motivates you and appeals to families and kids. But participation in a program like this is a way to distinguish themselves in the market, and that sits in tension with the goal you just outlined. Can you talk about how you navigate that?
Alethea: It’s a great question. I have struggled with harboring some middle-class judgment about some of the families who seem so thoroughly out of touch with the 99%. I have a story that sits in my head, just to give you a picture. In 2018, while President Trump is issuing Executive Orders against immigrants, travel bans, wall construction, and preventing refugees from requesting asylum on our southern border, California is battling the record-breaking Thomas Fire and a mudslide that killed 23 people. The timing coincides with a “pre-departure party” for an upcoming student trip to Tijuana to examine what’s happening with Trump’s new nativism. Coming from Santa Barbara, I literally drive on freeways through flames, thick smoke, and traffic jams of people fleeing to arrive in Brentwood. This is where the meeting is being hosted for 30+ people by the generous family of a student traveler. The dad CEO and the mother are very hospitable: their home is palatial—and the Latina housekeepers are serving the Mexican-themed food for the guests. It is over 85 degrees and we literally drove through fire to get there, but—and this is like a scene out of some LA sardonic comedy—because it’s December, the hostess had trucked in several tons of actual mountain snow to make it feel more festive. The hostess kept apologizing that the snow wasn’t right: “It’s melting and looks like old oatmeal. I’m so sorry!” This display of luxury is the realm of their lived experience. Yet all these kids in attendance at this party are going to Mexico to meet refugee communities. The tension between these things--it’s so weird. And too many parents want me to know that they aren’t like “the other mothers” who are “too afraid to send their kids on a trip to Tijuana.” The virtue signaling for the parents in their own sub-communities—it’s almost comedic. So, there are simultaneous forces at play: genuine concern and appalling decadence. My feeling is to harness the mothers who are vaguely aware of the belief that insular self-perpetuating privilege is not good for young people. There is an awareness that someday the kid is going to inherit all this money and hopefully says, “Fuck it. I’m going to fight for a better world instead.” For me, personally—I know this population of kids can be reached. I totally dispute this reductionist view that traveling somewhere with them is wrong. There are intrinsic downsides and risks—you risk doing a caricature of a place if you don’t experience it “properly.” But kids who self-select for ethical educational travel and parents who pay for it? There’s something there to work with.
Katy: What does Peace Works do to make the travel “proper”? How do you keep it from getting gross?
Alethea: The first couple trips I did were gross. I’ll just start there. I began traveling with kids in the late 1990’s, then it became an industry saturated with well-meaning white women trying to “save Africa.” There is the do-gooderism and voluntourism with the idea that you can go somewhere and “do something” and make things better, which is harnessing the disequilibrium we have as people who “have so much” for people who “have so little.” The counterpoint to that ugliness is to consistently ask, “How can we center the place that we are visiting?” It’s a practice which begins in the building of ethical partnerships. There are checklists we follow, guidelines for how to tread lightly, make a positive impact with our presence. Many of these ideas are derived from principles of Learning Service (http://learningservice.info/). Are the locals benefiting from this interaction? Are we patronizing locally-owned businesses? Are we encouraging our students to mitigate the harm of their consumption while in-country? In order for the trip to not be a superficial, tourist thing we have to build relationships with everybody along the supply chain who are going to help the kids—bus drivers, home-stay families, restaurateurs, non-profits, and the like. That means fair pricing and making sure that there are positive, mutually beneficial relationships with everyone. The truth is—I think critics of this kind of travel have some righteous indignation. Their position is that the only way to visit a place is to learn the language and stay long enough to meld into the community and be an anthropologist. But I disagree. That approach is not what is helpful to support communities on a scale that they can sustain. The idea that the locals just want us to buy stuff in the handicrafts gift shop and don’t want to put energy into designing a day of student activities together—I respect that a lot. We teach kids these dynamics and how to be reflective about being in a unique community space and how we’re seen by local people. Conducting that self-reflective exercise with students, which deals with ethnocentrism, helps kids unpack and be self-aware. We are choosing to work with partners who understand the community on multiple levels and will tell us, “You know what? I know you want a picture riding atop an elephant, but I’m going to tell you all the reasons we’re not going to do that.” They really serve as firm ambassadors of representing what’s okay and what’s not and why.
Katy: What have you found are powerful ways to facilitate that reflection away from reinforcing white saviorism or “benevolent elitism”?
Alethea: There isn’t a failsafe guarantee against that because you can’t screen all travelers for motive. We do try. Sometimes you can get a hint that some kids who want to go on our trips are motivated just to confirm some preconceived idea. They aren’t interested in doing deep, personal work. Yet, that child may grow to do more for the world given the chance to expand. The way we’re daily reflecting and the pre-learning they do about foreign policy through a critical human geography lens—that’s where framing comes into play. A student needs to be open to learning factual information which may conflict with their closely held identity and worldview as a person of privilege. Americans are amnesiac and it’s too easy for us to attribute cause and effect for complex historical things to more recent developments. Oftentimes those simplistic assessments are racist, blaming people for their circumstances. That kind of thinking tends to reinforce ideas of “American exceptionalism,” tenets of rapacious global capitalism. We want to think of our privilege as virtuously earned and justifiable. I think the way we get around white saviorism is by showing them the complexity of systems which create poverty and reinforces hierarchies. We’re honest with them about the exercise of global power by the “More Developed Countries” at the expense of “Less Developed Countries.” Part of this involves the candid and shocking exposure to how inhumane our foreign policy has been to most people in our destinations. Look at the militarism, look at the carnage, the deprivation—all of this imposed upon people and places precious to the global community. We look at it on so many levels to harness students’ natural compassion and sensory cognition. Imagine, the heart-opening of knowing how beautiful the people and places are while knowing what the U.S. did to the ancestors of our living friends there. In some cases, this is the first time students have learned how U.S. policy played out on the ground.
Katy: What are the short-term or long-term indicators that make you glad a kid traveled?
Alethea: It’s a longitudinal hope. In the short term, we ask students to write reflections which ask them to self-report indicators on civic engagement. The self-reporting data is positive, of course. But longitudinally, over twenty years, a lot of it is anecdotal. For example, there was a teenager who was very pro Iraq War following 9/11. He traveled with us to Vietnam, studied the case of John McCain and how international law is designed to protect captured enemies. It was his first exposure to the double-edged sword of war crimes. This young man was so stunned by this experience while traveling, he decided to pursue his education in military sciences. Years later, his career placed him in a position of being a low-profile whistleblower for Guantánamo. He remarked to me about the question of whether or not to stay silent after witnessing an abuse of military power: “Absolutely not. I remember John McCain’s holding cell in Hanoi. It was chilling. We have to make the rule of law mean something for everyone.” It’s that moment when someone steps up and embraces what they were exposed to. While not all former travelers can draw as direct, dramatic a line between their experiential learning outcome as this example, logic suggests that truism of the Holmesian concept: a mind and heart once “opened never regains its previous dimensions.”
Katy: All of education is never knowing when and where the experiences that kids have are going to activate for them in particular ways.
Alethea: Right. I am a hope-aholic. The abstraction of this work—the criticisms of travel designed for elite children aren’t wrong. Those inquiries help us be mindful about how we do this work, to consistently make sure we’re being honest, and weighing the ethics of all our choices. I just think there are ways to harness the curiosity of rich people’s children and that is a long-term good thing.
Katy: I’m a hope-aholic, too. There’s always that tension between the ideal and real and we need people on both sides moving things forward.
Alethea: And these kids are going to travel, so would you rather they go from the airport to the Ritz Carlton? Or from the airport to a homestay where they can learn how to prepare regional cuisine and hear stories from the matriarchs about life is in this beautiful place over time? Those kids are going to travel—let’s capture that demand and give it an ethical supply. The possibility to not raise our world’s children with consciousness for one another? It isn’t an option.
REFERENCES
Theoharis, J. (2018). A more beautiful and terrible history: The uses and misuses of civil rights history. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
ENDNOTES
1 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwdzCQhWvy4&feature=emb_logo for a video highlighting a Peace Works trip to Vietnam.
