World Schooling
We are almost fully booked, this is the first year we have launched it with our friends at Espacio Ubuntu and many people have shown interest. We are opening a Hub in Cantabria for WorldSchooling, or World Education, a space that turns the world into an educational environment. Something like an extended excursion where learning happens naturally through travel, rather than relying solely on textbooks or screens in a traditional classroom.
In this approach, history lessons come to life with visits to museums or historical landmarks, geography is explored by wandering through cities and towns, and language skills are honed by ordering meals in the local language or playing with local children in a park. Religious studies may involve entering temples or mosques, while physical education could be navigation lessons or hiking up a mountain.
We are very excited that it will happen in April at PAS Rural Coliving, and if all goes well, we will repeat it later with another edition before the end of the year. It is a great opportunity to highlight the territory, the nature that surrounds us, taking advantage of the mountains and the river, the prehistoric caves with more than 40,000 years of history, local businesses such as the 3 Valles Pasiegos cheese factory, where we can organize a cheese workshop, the house of Francisco de Quevedo, the Roman road, or visit a blueberry farm, a beech forest or a vineyard. We have multiple possibilities, in addition to the small farm where they can collaborate daily and the vegetable gardens to plant seasonal things.
It will undoubtedly be a great experience for our daughter Lucía, who although she does not speak English, will surely make herself understood. Being able to share with other children of her age, participate in activities, share outings together as a complement to formal education, seems to us to be the best way to educate. It will be four intense weeks of learning for all ages. Parents may have to work some hours in the coworking space, but we will also prepare activities for them so that they can share the Pasiego experience with their children.
We think this type of program is a great solution for the low season months in the space. By deciding not to receive tourists from the first year of opening the project, we are risking considerably reducing income in the summer months, but we know that we can achieve this in another way. This model is much more coherent for us, as well as combining it with European projects. In May we will also have a group of young Europeans, so little by little the calendar of the space is filling up and we are confident that we can achieve it.
The experiment is about converting a for-profit holiday accommodation, closed to the community and oriented towards mass tourism, into a more regenerative model, where we first finance ourselves with Fiare Banca Ética. Then, we create a non-profit cooperative society, so that we can reinvest profits in our projects in Africa. Then we stop receiving tourists to promote longer stays, from 15 days to 3 months. In addition, we open the space to the community, with various activities throughout the year. In the end, we managed to get the people who visit us to stay in the valley, spend money in restaurants and bars, buy local and live their lives here, thus managing to go in the opposite direction of mass tourism that always takes people to the same places.
In a couple of months we will begin the call for the summer season, opening the months of May, June, July, August and September for teleworkers, entrepreneurs and/or nomads. In September and October we will organize several events in the space that are becoming annual events where we can meet with old and new friends. It is a way to celebrate the arrival of autumn together, to thank the members of the community that we are co-creating, a celebration at home, a toast to life, a way to open the space for whoever feels invited.
And you… Do you feel the call?
