Why we are creating the Traveling Village

For as long as I can remember I have had a big interest for experimenting with lifestyle, often because I’ve been unsatisfied with normal solutions. Almost 10 years ago I got my dream job, but already after a week of commuting and no flexibility, I started to think “Is this it, is this how it is to be a grown up?”. There had to be a better way.

The same feeling came to me when expecting and having kids. We were very sure in our choice of unschooling. We already were used to a lot of freedom after having been self-employed and working remotely for many years, so being tied into one place, using daycare and having a completely fixed calendar where we would live separately from our (small) kids for the most of the day, was out of the question.

But unschooling small kids without community is too hard and, I fear, too unfulfilling with big kids. Community is necessary to make it work and we are determined to get it to work.

Finding a community of other unschoolers is quite hard, or at least it has been for us. Here in Denmark, most unschoolers tend to move to the countryside because of financial reasons and many of the people we have met simple give up along the way. Often because it’s just one part who really wants it (most often the woman) and it then simply becomes too hard.

Our dream of unschooling is partly based on hating the schoolification of childhood, but equally so in a dream of how childhood, parenting and family could look like. In an age where free range kids is on the verge of extinction, there has to be a better way.

The life with kids I imagine is full of exploration on the children’s own terms, based on interest, full of other adults they trust instead of daycare. It’s much more based on trust and being out in the real world instead of inside a classroom.

While we personally don’t believe daycare and school is the best solution for the kids, we don’t believe either that worldschooling or unschooling is just good. The risk here, among other, is that the parents have to sacrifice too much to just get it to work. R

ight now we are living completely asynchronous to our local environment, friends and family, waiting for everyone to be available after work and school. The result is that we are often one parent with two kids and full day, where we have to plan trips and activities, instead of doing this in a bigger group that is committed.

We, my wife and I, love remote work and being able to be free and travel. But remote work is not so interesting if it is not used to create better solutions or at least experiment with them.

That is why we are creating a traveling village. 20 families traveling together for 4months, committing to creating a real community with communal meals, activities for the kids, coworking and lots of adventure.

It’s an experiment in trying to tie new possibilities as remote work, freedom to unschool, nomadism into old values that has worked for centuries, being a community, helping each other and eating together.

The idea started as an “There has to be a better way”-thought, but in the last two months that idea has been shared with the world and we are now 4 families actively working on making this experiment a reality. Will it be a better way of doing things? Time will tell.