Students Need More Field Trips

Field trips have always appeared to be a luxury for young students. Visits to the local zoo or museum has a way of engaging students to learn while still having fun. It’s a great way of combining both the element of play and the element of education outside of a classroom environment. However, these field trips tend to dwindle throughout grade school, with most high schools no longer providing field trips, especially if a student isn’t in an extracurricular like band or sports. Why is it that we place so much emphasis on field trips during elementary school, but neglect to continue real-life learning opportunities once our students get older? And indeed, by the time a student is in college, field trips are now non-existent.

Education should not lie solely in the hands of a teacher, confined only to a classroom. The importance of memorizing dates and facts are essentially meaningless if students can’t find a use for it in the real world. A student’s day-to-day life and their academic studies aren’t separate, but should rather overlap constantly. The amount that students can learn from a textbook or a lecture alone is hindered without schools actively taking kids out into the world n order to apply what they have learned. We learn in order to know more about the world, but cutting students off from the world is taking steps backwards in their education.

Field trips are just one excellent way of teaching students more about what they learned in class in the form of real-life experiences. A kindergarten class can sing about giraffes and elephants, then actually get a chance to see one for an unforgettable experience. They have a memory that they can associate with what was once just a name or a picture. Singing in a school choir and having the chance to see a choir performance are two entirely different experiences. In a world that so heavily emphasis the need for hands-on experience in internships and the job market, why are we not encouraging students to go explore the world?

Schools, primarily middle to college levels, need to give all students more equal access to field trips. We have forgotten that field trips are not just fun rewards for a limited amount of students, but a way of giving students a fun, interactive education that they can continue to use throughout their life. We must connect the real world with out education, as schools are no less part of the real world than any other part of a student’s life.