The “Grand Tour” in Mud Boots: Expeditionary Education
by Stuart Grauer

A painting stopped me cold at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had passed Giovanni Paolo Panini's "Ancient Rome" countless times, but this day it grabbed me. Tiny human figures stood dwarfed by towering Roman ruins, sculptures, and classical paintings—a curated gallery of civilization's grandeur. For the first time, I understood the metaphor staring back at me: this was the educational dream of the Grand Tour, anachronistic and amazing, at once.

The museum placard read what I had never really grasped, that expeditionary learning has deep, complicated roots stretching back centuries through European aristocracy. This heritage shapes the expeditions our students take today, a mixed blessing. The heritage reflects, however faintly, the expeditionary learning we’ve developed over decades—though ours is shaped by different values and resources, and by a long effort to make such experiences available to all of our students, not just a few.

The Original Trip

For centuries, the Grand Tour was the capstone of elite European education—their graduation exhibit. Young aristocrats—mostly British, entirely male—spent months (or years) traversing cultural capitals: Paris, Florence, Rome, Vienna, even parts of the New World. The mission was direct engagement with the great ideas, works of art, history, and geography that shaped Western civilization.

First cut: this was profoundly elitist. These privileged few believed they were cultivating refinement and character through immersion in beauty and knowledge. All the same, beneath the exclusivity was a revolutionary educational principle we can hang on to: to be truly educated, you must leave the classroom, encounter the world directly, and return transformed.

This impulse is not elitist and warrants study: it appears across cultures—the Australian walkabout, the German Wanderjahr, the pilgrimage to Mecca, our modern gap years and semesters at sea. We once met 13-year-old Masai boys in Tanzania in traditional garb carrying spears, setting out to kill their lion, to come of age. At my house, we have hosted many travelling German and Dutch kids who, by tradition, often go on a wandering year before college. The forms vary, but the basics remain: real education happens through encounter, not just instruction or classroom time.

Breaking the Mold

The traditional classroom has long cast education as a limiting, controlling experience: the rows of desks, ivory towers, standardized preparation. The Grand Tour has challenged this view of teaching and learning right from the beginning. It said this:  the world is the classroom, wisdom comes through direct experience, and transformation requires leaving safe spaces behind.

We cannot and would not want to replicate the original Grand Tour model exactly. Panini's aristocrats got little mud on their boots. They traveled in silk and stayed in palaces. Their journeys excluded entire populations by design.

But we have extracted what matters most from this tradition while rejecting what does not serve us. The democratization of education means every student deserves access to transformational experiences, not just the privileged few. It means that we never let go of the knowing that great learning is experiential and expeditionary.

Expeditions!

Today's expeditionary schools represent a revolution that we can mistake for tradition. We have taken the aristocratic journey and made it radically inclusive. Where the original focus was classical refinement—polishing Latin in Florence, studying Caravaggio by candlelight—we have expanded the concept of what constitutes essential human knowledge.

While some lucky students have visited Rome and Paris if they are lucky, much more often they trek through local hills, drive up our own coast, or serve communities in need. All Grauer expeditions have service and immersive aspects. So instead of portraits in gilt frames, they find stories in ecosystems and living people. They may not return with refined manners and riding boots, but with calloused hands, more open-hearted.

I recall one student who returned from our San Juan Islands expedition speaking differently about her place in the natural world after kayaking alongside orcas. And another whose week interviewing homeless advocates in Washington D.C. shifted his career trajectory toward social justice. These transformations are rooted in the original Grand Tour's deeper purpose—not tourism, but bigger minds and consciousness.

Beyond Aristocracy

The new expeditionary model surpasses those aristocratic roots in crucial ways. Thanks to educational innovation, modern schools—often through decades of growth and support—can begin to offer students experiences once unthinkable outside royal circles. Of course, this access is not universal, and equity remains a daily effort. Transportation, technology, and educational innovation have increasingly democratized access to transformational journeys. We’re not there yet, and every year’s increases in our financial aid endowment make this whole experience more democratic and inclusive. (There are schools that fundraise for 100% of their whole-school expeditions.)

In sum, we have evolved the definition of what makes an experience educational. The original travelers sought cultural polish and social status. Today's expeditions cultivate environmental awareness, social responsibility, and authentic engagement with diverse communities. Students return with commitments to serve and protect the world, and to connect with new groups of people.

It's a fragile world. We need our kids plugged into its interconnectedness. That’s the Grand Tour.

Next Up…

The genius of expeditionary learning lies in this next level: engaging in the transformational power of direct experience while rejecting the exclusivity that once defined it. Keep the muddy boots and lose the silk pajamas. We keep the journeys coming but open the path to all.

Every expedition our students take—whether to Kyoto's temples or San Diego's urban neighborhoods—continues this ancient tradition of learning through encounter. The aristocrats who pioneered the Grand Tour would barely recognize what we have made of their vision, and that is the whole point.

The new, improved Tour is more inclusive, more purposeful, more connected to the urgent issues we find in these times-- not just the privileged few.

The “real” Grand Tour was never about the destinations. It was about the courage to leave home ground, charge out into the world, and return changed and wide-eyed. Let’s call that the tradition. I hope your whole life is a kind of grand tour!

Real education is the transformation that happens when we stop talking about the world, engage in our basic reading and study about the world, and start living in it as students and teachers with a growing sense of responsibility, open heartedness, and sometimes muddy boots. Whenever we produce amazing experiences like these for our students, I know we are developing better educated, more engaged, more grateful, and more compassionate citizens.

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