124: Jennie Germann Molz | The World Is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

So today we're together with Jenny German-Mals. First of all, Jenny, it's wonderful to meet you and for you taking the time right now. Thank you.

Jennie Germann Molz: 0:20

Thank you. Thanks for the invitation to join you.

Jesper Conrad: 0:24

Yes, and the world is our classroom. It is both our reality, but it's also a book title, so maybe we should start there. What made you dive into the whole area of world schooling.

Jennie Germann Molz: 0:40

Sure, yeah, the world is our classroom, and the subtitle is Extreme Parenting and the Rise of World Schooling. I had written a book about the intersection between tourism and technology, and I was really interested in how technology was allowing people to be social, even while they were on the move and even with social networks that were distant and dispersed, and so I had done some case studies of couch surfers I don't know if you recall the days of couch surfing before Airbnb and I had also studied travel bloggers and mobile apps those apps that were being developed for smartphones for travelers to engage with the places, the destinations where they were, or to sort of stay in touch with other travelers or with their family back home. And while I was doing this research, one of the travel bloggers in my sample was a father of two kids from Washington DC, and he and his wife were traveling. This was like 2010, 2011. They had taken their kids out of school and they were traveling around the world with their kids and trying to keep them on the curriculum with their school back home. So a lot of his blog was talking about those kinds of experiences and challenges, and I thought, oh, that's going to be my next project. Who are these families that are taking their kids out of school and educating them while traveling around?

Jennie Germann Molz: 2:12

A few years later, I had a Fulbright in Finland, in Lapland. Fulbright is like a scholarship grant that allows scholars from the US to go and stay in other countries, and then also funds. And I took my husband and my son with me, and so we were living up on the Arctic Circle and I knew I had a sabbatical coming up, and so I asked my son and my husband what would y'all think about maybe doing this like world schooling for a year? And I could do research on world schooling families. And my son was eight years old at that time. He got down from the table, he went in the other room and he came back. I was like, oh, he's not into it. But he came back with a piece of paper and a pencil and he said, okay, let's start writing down all the places we're going to go.

Jesper Conrad: 3:02

Nice.

Jennie Germann Molz: 3:02

Yeah. So I thought, okay, he's up for it. My husband was definitely up for it. We had done a lot of backpacking and traveling in our 20s before we started a family, and so that's what we did. I had the sabbatical a couple of years later, so when my son was 10, we took him out of what would have been the fifth grade for him and we traveled around the world. I got to meet lots of other families, interviewed them, did a lot of research on their blogs, and this was even before the word world schooling kind of existed. It was just sort of coming into circulation at that time. It comes from Eli Gerzon. He had sort of developed the word world schooling because he was promoting this idea of travel as education. He was also a proponent of unschooling, but he didn't like the word unschooling because it sort of has a negative connotation. Right, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 4:00

We know that problem.

Jesper Conrad: 4:02

Yeah, and so he came up with the term world schooling, and then, I think Lainey Liberty started using it after that been traveling now for around seven years full time with three kids, two dogs and occasionally our oldest grown-up daughter with her boyfriend comes visiting us. I can still be in doubt how to define world schooling. It's a nice term. It's a term many people use when they talk about what they're doing. Sometimes it can look like people are just taking a sabbatical one or two years out and just enjoying life and then kind of like to have that back free. They call it something with schooling. Some of it has ended up becoming kind of a lifestyle. But you who have dug into it and researched it, how would you define it? Is there some common traits among the families you have studied?

Jennie Germann Molz: 5:02

I resist being the one to define it because I think it depends on the families who use that term and it depends on how they define it.

Jennie Germann Molz: 5:14

That's more interesting to me than me giving them a definition, and, yes, there are a lot of commonalities among the families who use that terminology, I think.

Jennie Germann Molz: 5:25

Generally speaking, what I've found is that when people do use the term world schooling, what they're trying to get at is this idea of expanding learning beyond an institutional setting, right Making, trying to have this philosophy that learning is a way of life and that anything around you can be the impetus for kids to explore, become curious, learn something, become curious, learn something.

Jennie Germann Molz: 6:00

And so, for the most part, what I find is that when we start to try to pin down definitions like, well, how long do you have to be traveling for it to count as world schooling, or how many countries do you have to go to, or how frequently are you traveling, these definitions don't really fit the empirical reality of what people are doing, and so it becomes much broader. So people are using world schooling to refer to anything from we take trips on the weekends to people like you who have adopted it completely as their lifestyle. But I think what it really comes down to is a mindset or kind of a life philosophy, and so even families who aren't necessarily traveling at the moment might think of themselves as world schoolers because of that philosophy that they have, that schooling is something, or learning is something, that is just embedded in family life and in everyday life.

Cecilie Conrad: 6:59

I mean, I totally agree and I will give you a gold star for not defining it. I think that's the right thing to do, because it's one of the beauties of the community, really, that anyone can world school in any way they feel world schooling works for them, and no one can really say what exactly is it. And I just wanted to add that in my experience, there are quite a few world schoolers who have some sort of curriculum with them, so even world schooling can even be traveling around the world while studying a curriculum under some sort of online school or umbrella school or something like that.

Jesper Conrad: 7:37

Or even people put their school into a local school for three or four months and explore it.

Cecilie Conrad: 7:43

So it's not even just the ones that look like unschoolers in their style, it also can be homeschoolers, and even schoolers can define themselves as world schoolers, and I wouldn't object.

Jesper Conrad: 7:55

I mean.

Cecilie Conrad: 7:55

I don't own the word either.

Jesper Conrad: 8:01

Jenny, there's something about the subtitle that intrigues me and it is that sometimes when I talk with other people or when Cecilia and I talk about our way of being parents, we sometimes say that we might be a little extreme or it might be very different from how other people do it.

Jesper Conrad: 8:19

I find us very normal as parents in some way. I don't think it's in the extreme parenting and also I can be in doubt if we are radical. Sometimes people are like saying, oh, but you're also a little radical and I feel we are kind of very normal. But I can also see that it might be taking it to the extreme, the way we are listening to our children's wishes, having dialogue with them of how our days are going to unfold. And I'm just in doubt maybe what normal looks like nowadays, because maybe it is that what is considered the norm for me that looks extreme to fit into that box of life. But maybe that's where a lot of people who step outside the norm and go world schooling, exploring the world as parents, they find the commonality and might be extreme. What are your thoughts on that? I am sorry I'm rambling a little, but I'm trying to figure out what I mean here.

Jennie Germann Molz: 10:09

Sure, I can explain a little bit more why I use that terminology and how it fits in with my broader argument in the book. I mean, I agree with you as a sociologist normal is just what we agree is normal, right, there is no objective normal or extreme. It's all relative and it's all socially constructed. But the reason I use extreme parenting is because of some media coverage around families who were taking. There was some media coverage around a family who had a toddler on a sailing trip around the world and the baby became very, very ill and they had to call in an emergency helicopter to rescue the family. And in the media coverage there was a lot of critique about the family's choices being too extreme.

Jennie Germann Molz: 11:01

There was another book that came out around that time chronicling a family that was basically world schooling and took their very young children to Nepal and again the father became very, very ill and kind of risked the health and safety of the family, and so some of the coverage of that was is this too extreme? And so I thought, oh, is there a line? How is society kind of deciding where that line is of what's extreme or what's not extreme? And as I was doing research with families, of course, there's this concept of radical unschooling, which a lot of people might consider an extreme approach, but then there's also helicopter parenting, which others might also consider an extreme approach, and so I began to look at some where these examples of parenting get labeled as extreme. What's actually going on on that continuum between being extremely, let's say, free range or extremely unschooling, or being extremely involved like a helicopter parent? When I use the term helicopter parenting, is that something that has reached Denmark? I?

Jesper Conrad: 12:23

heard the term before, but it doesn't ring a children's bell. I think we call it curling parents, probably.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:29

I mean we just have to. I understand what you mean. What do you call it? We have the term curling parents. You know the sport curling, yeah yeah. So you run like it's paving the way, making everything easy and making sure they're going in the right direction, and I think that's what you're talking about you just call it.

Jesper Conrad: 12:47

Yes, exactly the reason we call it that is that Denmark, for some reason, is very good at this stupid sport and we had someone winning the world championship.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:55

So everyone knows the terminology.

Jennie Germann Molz: 12:58

But it's the same kind of.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:00

Is it a bit like tiger parenting as well?

Jennie Germann Molz: 13:02

I mean that has more push though. I think these are all kind of related, right? Yeah, it's the other end of the spectrum, relative to radical unschooling, I would say yeah, exactly, we also have the terms like snowplow parenting, right, like kind of clearing the way for the kids, like curling I love that I haven't heard curling parenting, I like that one.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:23

We say that. Maybe it's just in Danish. We say it.

Jesper Conrad: 13:25

Yeah, maybe.

Jennie Germann Molz: 13:26

Yeah, well, in any case, what I realized was that all of these forms of parenting could be considered extreme depending on the perspective you're coming from, but even though they seem like they're on completely opposite ends of the spectrum the curling parents or the helicopter parents, who are so over-involved and so kind of like managing every aspect of their children's lives.

Jennie Germann Molz: 13:52

And then the free range parenting I think I saw you had interviewed Lenore Skenazy on your podcast, right, and her idea of free range parenting and radical unschooling on the other end. But what I came to understand is that all of these parents are operating with a similar set of anxieties and aspirations about the world their children are growing up in, and that these families understand that the future is very uncertain. The world we live in is very uncertain politically, environmentally, culturally. I mean, there are just a lot of things that we just don't know. Not that the future has ever been certain, but there was a sense in the 1900s, I think for a while of kind of like if you do this, your life will unfold like this, right, and you could kind of like if you take these steps, you will have this kind of a life. But that's really not guaranteed in today's society, especially in places like the United States I don't. Maybe in Denmark there's a stronger sense of security or predictability.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:05

Well, security we have a lot of, but predictability, I think, is the same.

Jennie Germann Molz: 15:09

Right. So these parents are raising children for an unpredictable future, for a world that they aren't quite sure what will set their kids up for success in this world. Different calculus the curling parents or the helicopter parents are making the calculus that if they keep their kids on a straight and narrow path, if they make sure that they tick all the boxes, do all the extracurricular activities, get into the right college, that that will somehow help them keep a foothold in the middle class. And the parents who are choosing world schooling, the middle class, and the parents who are choosing world schooling, unschooling, free range parenting, are making a different calculus, which is to kind of embrace the uncertainty and to teach their kids skills to live in uncertainty and to kind of leverage uncertainty to capitalize on it in a way right. So rather than battening down the hatches and sort of like protecting their kids against uncertainty, they're like teaching them how to surf on the wave of uncertainty.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:20

I can relate.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:21

And also I mean, if I can add to it as just one little sample of this segment, to me as well, it's about not living for the future, not trying to strategize it, to live a life that makes sense here and now. Not that I think it doesn't set us up for a good life tomorrow, but I think a lot of life is spent trying to set us up for success later, spend trying to set us up for success later, and so we're not in the moment and I'm trying to teach my children and my husband and myself that we're here now, that's what we know, and not to make the most of it, but to make something meaningful out of it and staying present. So it's not about what can I become, but what am I and where am I and who am I with? What are we doing?

Jesper Conrad: 17:14

What you said, Jenny, made me think of a dialogue I had with my dad. I wanted to make movies when I was young, around 16. High school didn't interest me. College didn't interest me, but my parents asked me to finish. It's called high school college, it's like from 15 to 18.

Jesper Conrad: 17:33

They're like please finish this, then it would be easier. If you go another direction later and the dialogue I had with my father was basically he said to me but Jesper, if I look back at my career, what I'm working with now wasn't invented when I took an education 30 or 40 years earlier. So I don't know what would be the right education for you. If you want to do this, do it, but then do it good, and it's kind of the same I wish for my children is that I believe they will find a way, but I believe that if they know themselves good and proper, if they know how to learn, know how to obtain knowledge, and that they have this rest in themselves, then life would be easier.

Jesper Conrad: 18:24

Where for me you can say academic skills is more an add-on, it will come. Those I'm not afraid of, but I can be afraid of them living a life of personal insecurity or not being able to, not stand their ground but not being able to go out and meet the world. I've met many people during my life who what is against them is not being able to interact properly with people on their workplace or stuff like that. More than the skillset I mean, skills can be learned.

Jennie Germann Molz: 19:03

What you're describing, what you're outlining here, is something that I refer to in the book as the emotional curriculum of world schooling.

Jennie Germann Molz: 19:14

And one of the things I discovered in my research is that a lot of families would go into world schooling with quite a bit of concern about how their children were going to master an academic curriculum right. How are they going to learn what they needed to learn? For some families they went into world schooling already understanding what unschooling was and already having that philosophy. But not all of the families A lot of the families went into it very much with a, you know, with a schooling mindset embedded in them and they kind of had to unlearn that and realize that unschooling just kind of fits better with traveling.

Jennie Germann Molz: 19:56

It's just right Then having to have all the books and the schedules and the tests and everything. But the other realization that they often came to was that traveling was teaching their kids things that weren't necessarily things you could test in an academic way. It was teaching them how to communicate. Well, a lot of the things you were just describing, jesper, like teaching them how to communicate with other people, how to be attuned to other people, how to feel a sense of compassion, how to deal with change, how to become self-reliant.

Jennie Germann Molz: 20:34

So it was a lot of what I call life lessons, sort of learning how to feel about themselves, how to feel about other people and how to feel about their place in the world as a result of traveling, and a lot of the parents would sort of make this justification that, okay, well, my kid can't list all the US presidents in chronological order, but they can play with kids who don't speak the same language as them, or they can buy ice cream in a different language and get the change in a different currency, or they're learning these other kinds of skills. So, of course, that leaves the big question. So they are learning all of these life lessons and all of these sort of emotional intelligence, emotional skills, but what is happening to the academic part of it? Right, like there hasn't really been any longitudinal research on where world-schooled kids are in terms of some of the academic metrics that their home countries might expect them to have mastered.

Jesper Conrad: 21:48

I was as a parent earlier, I was more fear-based. I was not the one thinking that the homeschooling, unschooling was a good idea. That was my wonderful wife and my kids, and it took me some time to open up to it and understand it. But what I see now is that it is kind of a waiting game because if they are led to their own devices not technical devices but their own time in life, I see it comes and it comes around. For the boys I've seen it in our family just 14, 15, there comes a loss for the academics. The waiting period until then.

Jesper Conrad: 22:30

Oh my God, I have been afraid, I have been fearful, I've been like will they ever learn stuff? And then looking at my kids sitting watching psychology, behavioral psychology, and our son who is now 13, I can see it growing in him, this loss for something. It's kind of like the brain needs to maybe go through puberty and then some centers opens up. I'm not sure about it, but I can just see it's a waiting game and I think some people don't have the. The fear is bigger than the trust in this sense and of course every family is different. I can be lucky with our kids, but that it has come I don't know.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:11

But well, if you're a true unschooler, you don't have to have academics come.

Jesper Conrad: 23:16

No, but it's not important if it's academics or not. It's seeing the development from going from a playing to a someone who wants that deeper knowledge, whatever area it is, it doesn't need to be academic. With Fjord, for example, some of what I see is the guitar. How he's going deep with that.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:36

We're talking a lot about our own case. I was thinking. One problem I have with this comparing the academic skills of the world school teenager to the academic skills of the school teenager is the format. So the school teenager has a specific way of displaying and I think it's worse in the American school system than it is over here and especially here in the North, whereas things are softer in a way. But they have been studying for the test for such a long time. They know exactly how to show that they know or they at least have memorized. So if you put a world school kid into these tests they might fail big time, even though they do have deep knowledge of math and of world history. World history, not just locals. So for American kids it would be American history, for our over here it might be European history or just Danish history. But our kids and the kids in the community, they have very deep knowledge because they've been to the places, they've been puzzled about the things, they've met the people They've seen the artwork or a good example.

Cecilie Conrad: 24:48

Reason from our life is that we spend a lot of time two years ago in Normandy, france, and obviously we learned a lot about D-Day and the end of the Second World War. So it reveled back a lot of the Second World War stuff. And then, hey, what about the first one? What happened there? And so there was a lot of things and this just happens in an organic way Conversations. You drive by another museum or another memorial or something and you talk about it and you see it, you've been there. There's the bell church tower where that guy got stuck with his parachute and what happened to him and he had to pretend to be dead for six hours. You know all the things and these stories stick because you were there, you know and you were actually just out buying bread. But then you learn and they have very deep knowledge. And now, just six months ago we spent a month in Krakow, poland, and they went to Auschwitz and we lived in the Jewish ghetto area where the Jewish ghetto used to happen during the war.

Cecilie Conrad: 25:49

So these things are so deep in the cells of the knowledge of our children. Now they might not be able to spit out names and dates. They might make a fail and multiple choice test on the Second World War, but I can guarantee you they know a lot about it. You know they read Primo Levi, they saw the movies, they had all the conversations. They still have them and this is the kind of knowledge that might be a little bit fragmented compared to the ambition of a curriculum, but it looks different and it feels different. So I think if we did a long term study of world school children and how their academics evolved during their teenage years, I don't think it would be right to measure with the same instrument, because my kids have never had a multiple choice test ever.

Cecilie Conrad: 26:48

They've never been to school, they've never written an essay, they don't know how to perform in an exam, but they know a lot of stuff. So that's one thing and the other thing is, I think very often when we try to compare the world schooled and unschooled children and their level of academic knowledge to the schooled children, we tend to compare it to the ambition of the curriculum, not to the reality of the kids coming out of school. It becomes this do they know all of this stuff that most of the kids who come out of school actually don't know? And that's another very, I find. As a mother I've been doing this for what now? 12, 15 years, something like that, unschooling my kids, our kids. I feel when I sometimes have to defend our lifestyle, I have to defend it up against the standard Very few teenagers of the traditional or normal, whatever mainstream life actually meet. So why do I have to do that? Because most world school kids they don't fail in life, whereas a lot of school kids actually fail the exams. They don't know all the stuff.

Jennie Germann Molz: 28:03

I'm curious when are you kind of asked to defend your lifestyle?

Cecilie Conrad: 28:10

not very often any longer no, but I mean just just recently.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:14

We were at a wedding and that was curiosity oh, there were other people talking there was one couple. They were curious and interested. We talked to them for a long time and that was fun. But we are the traveling circus. Sometimes, when we arrive in settings with people who live mainstream life and a wedding is a good example when we meet people who are not part of the community, of course we're surrounded very often by other travelers and other home educators, so we don't have to defend our lifestyle. But then again, you know, then maybe the sister of a home educating friend shows up, or a friend of a friend, or a mother-in-law, or sometimes it can even be the bus driver, you know, asking why they're at the same school.

Jesper Conrad: 29:00

I think it's a very wonderful question, jenny. I think it's a very wonderful question, jenny. There's some skewed reality that I think we as parents doing something outside the norm are more often asked about the validity of our choices than the people following the norm. I find this is, at the same time, natural, because when people do something outside the norm, people get curious and it can also be a mirror that reflects their own choices in a way they maybe don't like. So it would be better for them if our lifestyle sucked and it wasn't good in a sense.

Jesper Conrad: 29:42

I see, if I look back at when we started traveling seven years ago, my life changed from being at work talking with colleagues who knew we homeschooled, to going traveling, and one of the things I saw was that it changed. Where people earlier had been more critical against homeschooling, then they were like oh, are you going on a world adventure? I always dreamt about that. So there is this fun difference just based on that. Now we do it location independent. But I think the overall thing is that maybe we sometimes still feel a need to stand our ground against the norm and that can end up coming something where we defend ourselves and then there often also are people asking at weddings other things, and one of the things or their arguments when we talk with them is oh, but you can do it, we could never. And I think that makes it easier for people that we do something different, if they can define it as luck or a world where it's not possible for them, but we are lucky in some sort.

Jennie Germann Molz: 31:02

So it sounds like most of these situations are social, not defending to I don't know, your local school district or the state government.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:12

No problem with authorities Crossing borders? No, not that.

Jesper Conrad: 31:18

Denmark is wonderfully free, Well everywhere.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:20

We've never had any problems with taking our kids over borders or with local police authorities, schools, anything like that. We're lucky enough to come from a country. We don't live here any longer. We just happen to be in Denmark right now, where it's a constitutional right to homeschool. So if there was ever anyone to ask us locally somewhere, what are you doing, we can just lean on our constitution and say we have the right to do this in our country. But we have actually never been asked.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:50

No, when I actually do feel attacked. I've been thinking about it, yeah, for the past 10 minutes or whatever, okay, of this conversation. I feel sometimes attacked with these questions. You know what would happen if? And are you sure they're learning that? And how can you but all of those things. Sometimes it feels like an attack and it feels like I have to defend. And that brings me back to extreme parenting and I'm thinking you know the risk taking. You talked about getting sick on a boat or getting sick in Nepal. I mean, in your country you get sick from having the school lunch, it just takes a longer time. Who's taking the larger risk? The mental health of children these days it's declining rapidly. Most of them, a lot of them feel really really poor.

Jesper Conrad: 32:43

No, it's not. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not attacking your country but, we don't have school lunches.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:49

So I can't attack the school lunches here, but I mean even just feeding your kids things you can buy in the supermarket can get them sick. This lifestyle, the mainstream lifestyle with the school life, it's clear that it's attacking the mental health of the children and the young people. It's clear that it's attacking the mental health of the children and the young people. It's clear that there's a great risk of a very, very bad life. There's a risk to their health and to their mental health and we have to defend taking them to a country that might have some disease that we weren't prepared for, or drinking water that might be poisoned. I mean, the water is pretty often poisoned in Western countries. Just take it out of the tap and it's full of crap these days. So why is the risk that I'm taking so much more irresponsible compared to the risk everyone's taking all the time?

Jennie Germann Molz: 33:43

The point you're making is one that a lot of the parents I interviewed also made that they felt like taking their children to travel and to world school was a much lower risk than having them stay in conventional institutional schooling, especially in the United States where school shootings are actually quite common, where a lot of schools you know well, like you point out, the food, the school lunches, the health of those lunches is questionable bullying. So families have a lot of like counterpoints right of why maybe staying in school is riskier than not staying in school yeah and sorry if it came out.

Jennie Germann Molz: 34:32

I'm not attacking you personally oh no, I know, I know yeah yeah, no, no, of course not.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:40

I'm just thinking. You know why is even? It's just funny how you know shit can hit the fan for everyone. Really. I mean, that happened to that family on that boat, but it could really happen, you know.

Jesper Conrad: 34:57

At home.

Jennie Germann Molz: 34:57

that's right, there are probably a lot of people sailing around the world who don't get very sick world who don't get very sick, and I think that world schooling and really any kind of alternative lifestyle or countercultural lifestyle, I like to think in terms of how these things reveal anxieties. So, for the families that are choosing this lifestyle, they're doing it because they have some anxiety about the status quo. Right, there's something about the status quo that just is it working for them? Or they have anxiety about how their kids if their kids don't really toe the line or fit into the school setting. Maybe they've been diagnosed with a learning difference or with ADHD, or they're not good at taking standardized tests, like you were pointing out, cecily like that, your kids have never even taken a multiple choice test.

Jennie Germann Molz: 35:49

So there's a lot of anxiety that comes from trying to fit into a system that doesn't feel authentic. But there's this other anxiety floating around. When we have alternative lifestyles and people who are pursuing these alternative lifestyles, it creates anxiety in the broader society because it's like, oh wait, things could be different. And so we start to see what some of the deeper held, like the anxious zeitgeist of a society is at the moment. People like yourselves who are kind of like oh wait, no, we don't actually have to do that, stirs up that kind of existential anxiety like, oh wait, if we could be doing things differently, why aren't we? And so I think it's interesting to look at it from both of those angles.

Cecilie Conrad: 36:44

And I think that's exactly why I feel I have to sometimes defend my lifestyle.

Cecilie Conrad: 36:49

It could look on the surface like an innocent, curious question, but behind that is this inner turmoil.

Cecilie Conrad: 36:57

So if what she's doing makes sense, then I could have done the same thing, and maybe I actually felt every time I told my child to go back to school where he's bullied, or I left my very young child in the care of someone else and it hurt and it felt wrong, but I suppressed it because the nursery teacher told me that this is normal and they will stop crying in three minutes. If I have to feel all these things now and I have to realize that I could have done something else, then how do I handle that crisis? Oh, it's better to protect my own emotions and just attack that woman doing her crazy stuff, and I think that's why it becomes this feeling that I have to stand my ground, and I usually try to get out of it. If I have that feeling that this is what's going on or something, there's too much energy loaded in the questions I usually ask for salt, or you know comment on the red wine, or just change the subject Emotional skills.

Jennie Germann Molz: 38:05

That's an emotional skill? Yes, it is.

Jesper Conrad: 38:08

Jenny, I am curious about why it is on the rise. We were not the first who did it. To take our own story, very briefly, we started homeschooling because one of our children didn't want to go to school. Cecilia has just been cancer. They had been at home with us and it felt unnatural for him to go away from mom. That had been at the hospital for half a year. And then we started slowly still finding our grounds after living through this difficult period. And when you start homeschooling you realize how much of your life is turned up and circled around having a child in a school. For us it was the house we lived in, the job I had and all these things were like in a circle around our house, the children's school and my job. But then when the kids were at home, I was the only one going away and then in the end it just felt weird that we had a big house.

Jesper Conrad: 40:01

I was never there because I had to make the money and then we were never there because we were always on a day trip, always on a day trip, and then the sun just shined a lot more in other countries and we ended up going. But to take the question again, we started our travels seven years ago and dipped our toes in it before that, but have been full-time traveling for now seven years. But you told about this guy who started already in 2010 and it's 15 years since and you say that it's on the rise. What do you think it is in society that is making this more popular? Do you see some streams of what is happening that might make people say, hey, I want to opt out of this. What are your thoughts on it? I want to opt out of this.

Jennie Germann Molz: 40:47

What are your thoughts on it? I think there are so many factors that feed into the growth of world schooling and other kinds of mobile and alternative lifestyles. I see a lot of overlap between world schooling and digital nomadism, for example, which is what I'm studying currently. I think I don't know if I can like break it down into points, but I'll just say a few points. I think one is technology and that kind of there's a lot to that. So technology, in the sense that it's made location, independent work possible and in the social media landscape, that has made the lifestyle visible and, I think, in a lot of ways, more accessible. A lot of world schooling families and similar with digital nomads spend a lot of their online air teaching other people how to do the lifestyle, and so I think that gives it more accessibility.

Jennie Germann Molz: 41:44

The other factor I'm not sure exactly how I would pinpoint this, but I believe that there has been just a general decline in trust in government and in government institutions and a general decline in the sense of schools as a common good, and so people are.

Jennie Germann Molz: 42:07

I think a lot of families are disillusioned by school as an institution and don't trust it.

Jennie Germann Molz: 42:15

They themselves may have had bad experiences when they were students or their children have bad experiences of the education market has created this situation where, going back to our earlier conversation, there's a lot of standardized testing, standardized curriculum and families just aren't finding that is meeting their needs and so they're more willing, I think, to reject institutional schooling and then just access to travel. I mean people, my book came out in the middle of COVID and the publisher was like, oh well, they barely even marketed it because they were like, well, I guess this is over. I was like, oh no, this is just getting started, because, yeah, I mean there's a little glitch and a lot of people stopped traveling for a while during COVID. But what COVID showed a lot of families was that they could do schooling online and so schooling could also be location independent. And so I think, coming out of COVID kind of, we saw world schooling and digital nomadism, kindism, turbo boosted by those that's true, that's just to name a few.

Jesper Conrad: 43:35

I'm curious to hear your thoughts about being a nomad, because that's not a new thing, but it feels like the nomadic lifestyle has gotten this revival with the tech and the infrastructure and all these things. Do you think it's something deep inside of people that there is this need? Have you thought about this, studied it, because for me it feels supernatural. But also the nomadic part of returning to the different watering holes you can say, when we travel we more or less have a route places we return to, friends we return to and where we follow the weather. Denmark is wonderful in the summer.

Jesper Conrad: 44:19

Today it's raining but generally Denmark is beautiful and lush in the summer and Spain is wonderful in the winter, so we follow the sun or the seasons, and eternal spring is quite nice. But what are your thoughts on this? Have you looked into this in any of your other studies also?

Jennie Germann Molz: 44:40

So you're right, nomadism is the human story. Right, it's not new, but the kind of digital nomadism that we're looking at now is also not new. David Manners and Sugio Makimoto published a book in 1996 called the Digital Nomad and do their work that they would follow what Manderson Makimoto called that kind of human impulse to nomadism. They did say something kind of interesting in that book, though. They said the one group of people who won't be able to be digital nomads is families because the geographical tie of school is too strong and they won't be able to break it.

Jennie Germann Molz: 45:29

So that's one prediction they got wrong. So if you ask them, yes, there is this kind of like innate human impulse to travel, to wander. But I think you're also getting at another part of it, jesper, by talking about returning to the waterholes, which is that, for nomads, for all of us, the water holes, which is that for nomads, for all of us, place still matters and having a sense of belonging to place or in place is still incredibly compelling. One of the things I've been tracking in my research is this idea of the digital nomad map, or like geographies of digital nomadism, and you're probably familiar with the hubs, right? You can probably guess exactly what they are, where digital nomads tend to go Medellin, colombia, chiang Mai, thailand, bali, right. So places that have the weather, the tourist amenities, fast Wi-Fi, all of that stuff.

Jennie Germann Molz: 46:26

But what I'm also finding is that families are charting a slightly different map to digital nomads who are traveling without kids. So digital nomad families who are traveling with kids are tending to chart this map where they're more likely to go to smaller towns or maybe rural or remote areas or, like you're doing right now, to live on farms with other families. So it's less an urban map and more of a kind of more slightly more rural or small town map. Also, as we talked about earlier, while a lot of these families do unschool their kids, a lot also do want to enroll them in schools, but not in conventional schools. So places that have alternative schooling options, like the Green School in Bali, for example, the Hypea Learning Hub in Portugal, some of these destinations that have either like a world schooling community hub or that have a school with an alternative curriculum, become the destinations on this map. So digital nomad families are kind of creating a new map and circulating among these very familiar destinations.

Jesper Conrad: 47:47

What changes have you seen since your book came out?

Jennie Germann Molz: 47:52

Oh gosh, just the sheer growth in number of families who are undertaking this lifestyle. The visibility in online and social media settings has been astounding to me. I think the kind of the mainstreaming of world schooling the mainstream media has become really interested in it. It's still really not a topic in academic research I don't really know that many other researchers who have been looking at it from an academic perspective but the mainstream media has definitely tuned into it. I've also seen the rise of a whole cottage industry of businesses and products and services catering to the world schooling market as well in the digital nomad family market, which wasn't really there 10 years ago.

Jesper Conrad: 48:46

Jenny, where does your curiosity come from? Why are you curious about the digital nomad and the world schooling? What is it that makes you use so many hours writing a book doing research? It's a kind of a nerdy thing here. So what is it?

Jennie Germann Molz: 49:05

Thanks, I'll take that as a compliment.

Jesper Conrad: 49:07

Thanks, I'll take that as a compliment it is nerdy.

Jennie Germann Molz: 49:11

I moved around a lot as a kid. I went to 11 different schools before I graduated from high school and in my 20s I traveled all over the world. And I remember being at a hostel in Indonesia back in 1994, maybe and seeing this guy with a laptop computer and all these wires trying to get a modem hooked up to a phone cord. I didn't even know what a modem was and I was like, what are you doing? He's like oh, I have to send my newsletter to all my friends, updating them on my trip. I was like, oh my God, my friends have no idea where I am. Like maybe they got a postcard from where I was five weeks ago.

Jennie Germann Molz: 49:54

But like, this is crazy, right, it was just so fascinating to me this, this desire to travel the world on the one hand, right, that human impulse to be nomadic on the one hand, paired with this desire to be in touch with everybody back home at the same time. To me, that was such an interesting paradox and that's kind of what all of my research has explored ever since. How do we move and stay connected? What does that look like? Why do we do it? Why do we? We want to do it. So maybe that's where my curiosity comes from jenny, it has been a big pleasure.

Jesper Conrad: 50:37

It could be really great if you want to share the title of your book where they can find it and where they can read your research if they want to. And also, yeah, just how do they dive into the world of the subjects that interest you? Where do they find you and your research?

Jennie Germann Molz: 50:55

Where do they find me? Well, I am not very active on social media, but you can Google Jenny German Molls and that will take you to my account at College of the Holy Cross, where I teach sociology. My book is the World is Our Classroom Extreme Parenting and the Rise of World Schooling, published by NYU Press, and it's available anywhere you buy books.

Jesper Conrad: 51:22

So, to round up, it has been really interesting and it has been fun for me to hear an academic view of the lifestyle we have walked down and I know I will ponder of some of the questions that have arisen here. So thanks a lot for your time.

Jennie Germann Molz: 51:39

Thank you, it's been a real pleasure, it was.

Cecilie Conrad: 51:42

It was fun.