Skip to Main Content

The World Is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling

Online ISBN:
9781479815128
Print ISBN:
9781479891689
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

The World Is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling

Jennie Germann Molz
Jennie Germann Molz
College of the Holy Cross
Find on
Published online:
23 September 2021
Published in print:
23 February 2021
Online ISBN:
9781479815128
Print ISBN:
9781479891689
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

This is a book about worldschooling and the families who educate their young children while traveling the world. Adopted primarily by white, middle-class parents from the Global North, worldschooling represents a new kind of life strategy, one that starts with seeing the world as their children’s classroom, but extends to the way worldschoolers parent, perform family life, work digitally and remotely, create communities online and on the road, and negotiate a sense of belonging and global citizenship on the move. While worldschooling appears to be a countercultural practice, it is actually emblematic of the mobile lifestyles that are becoming more common in contemporary society as individuals search for the “good life” in uncertain times. Based on a “mobile virtual ethnography” of traveling families, the book illustrates how this mobile lifestyle project is interwoven with the new individualism of late modernity, the new technical and economic arrangements of neoliberal capitalism, and the new uncertainties of life in a risk society. Each chapter details the strategies worldschooling parents deploy to live a good and morally justifiable life under the turbulent conditions of late modernity while preparing their children to thrive in an uncertain future. This analysis reveals that mobile lifestyles do not transcend social hierarchies, but introduce new mechanisms of distinction. Instead of transmitting economic capital to their children, worldschooling parents secure their children’s position of privilege in an uncertain world by equipping them with new forms of social, emotional, and cultural capital derived through mobility.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close