Field Trip Value

The Educational Value of Field Trips: My Experience
As a student in high school, I participated in a number of field trips meant to supplement my classroom experience, expand my horizons, and give me a new perspective on the world. Most of the time, these trips resulted only in my gratitude at being released from the confines of the classroom for a while. However, during my freshman year, as a part of the curriculum for an elective course called Holocaust Literature, I participated in a field trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC that truly did change my world view. A field trip is usually something eagerly anticipated by students, simply for the sake of adding variety to the students’ day. The educational goals are rarely considered to be very important from the students’ point of view, although some field trips do achieve those goals. As identified by Greene, Kisida, and Bowen (Greene, et al) in their study “The Educational Value of Field Trips”, schools accept the potential for chaos, liability issues, and lost children because they recognize that their mission as educators goes beyond simple academic instruction. Rather, they seek to “also to produce civilized young men and women who would

It made me realize that every person is impacted by the suffering of others and that it is never right to allow the fact that those who are suffering are far away from me, geographically or culturally, to be a rationale for my doing nothing. I have come to see that history is not something that is over and done; rather, it is something that can provide a lesson on how to behave in the present. It made me realize that doing nothing to help someone who is being persecuted makes one implicit in that person’s persecution. While I do not think that every museum would have the same effect on my views, this one certainly had an unforgettable