Tourism is an effective
modality of achieving knowledge. The best study of man is man, says the poet
Pope. A man when he sets out in the world as a tourist, comes across different
people of multiple cross-sections and traverses in the
multiple geographical scenarios, and gets himself acquainted with
historical evidences, and also the present day truths. A concrete knowledge is
obtained through extensive tours. No sense organ is more potent a factor than
the eye. Man reads but doubts and suspicion can challenge him; he hears yet he
remains the victim of chaos and confusions. But once he sees with his own eye,
all doubts and suspicions vanish away and the bookish knowledge becomes
confirmed. Thus, field visits and observations impart to use three-dimensional
knowledge, which nothing can efface.
Therefore, tourism must form an integral part of our education. Every student must aspire to become a tourist but his tour must carry an education value in it. People do travel with various motives, and objectives. Business may be one purpose, relaxation and enjoyment may be the other. But these varieties must be grouped in the secondary category, the primary one being totally educational. Tourism has the potentiality of expanding and enlarging man's heart and mind simultaneously. Let man possess a heart of Buddha, and a mind like that of Shankarachary. Everyman in a narrow place of his birth and living thinks about his own place as the most beautiful one, his culture as the most refined one and his fellow brothers of the place as the best specimens of humanity but when he comes out in the open world as a tourist, all narrowness and nastiness would evaporate. A frog of the well visits the ocean and a unique transformations takes place. Tourism can teach multiple disciplines of knowledge, all at the same time. History, geography, culture, natural science, music, anthropology etc. are best not through the lips of professors but through extensive tourism, when it is inspired by the philosophy of true education.
Tourism is a common subject, which can help every cross-section of society but student-community can derive maximum benefits from it, because student career is a fertile career, where everything good or bad can be tourism. Every school, college and university must prepare schedules for its students to visit the concerned fields; it must be made a compulsory activity without which the subject of teaching would not be regarded as complete. But the planning and programming of such educational tours must be economic. The expensive design may invite the scenarios of luxuries, indiscipline and other undesirable activities coming in between.
Since tourism can induce its positive effect to every common citizen, it is the duty and responsibility of the government to inspire and promote tourism making it convenient from multi-dimensional perspective. This activity must be easy, comfortable, educative and economic. Let everyone understand the value of humanity in the context of cosmic and transcendental truths. Let tourism hold its educational value in its eternal pattern preparing a grand galaxy of good students and eventually good citizens of a nation, nay, of the cosmos.
