Many are privileged white collar professionals who can work remotely, or those with investment income:
World-schoolers fund their travel with a mixture of remote work, including online teaching, real estate and trading stocks. Living and health costs in many other countries tend to be significantly lower.
The community of traveling families using the globe as their classroom is growing. Welcome to the “world school” revolution – CBS News
Some do this on their own – as an extension of home schooling – while others pay fees to enroll in global education programs like this one or this one.
Suspect most of these global family travelers had global travel experience before deciding to pack up the family and travel the world for a year or two or more. Yep:
Jamie Neilans, 46, from Honeoye Falls, New York, traveled with the company to Peru with her 12-year-old son Jace during his summer break because she wanted him to experience living abroad– and she wanted to do it with him. When she was younger Neilans lived in Mexico for six months which “changed her life.”
Good for them but this is not actually something that everyone can do. In fact, the article suggests less than 100,000 families are doing this.
The author of this CBS news story has extensive international experience, having trained “female reporters in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Francophone Africa on public health issues, including trafficking, gender-based violence and exploitation” and lives in both Brooklyn, NY and Spain. An issue I am documenting on another blog is that most national news reporters have elite educations and elite global experiences that are very different than the people they write for and about. More on that another day.