HOW life has changed - and if only the kids really understand that.

That's what I was thinking after I sent my wife off at the airport on Thursday night.

She and three other staff members were taking 26 pupils on a field trip to India.

Looking at the group of parents gathered at the check-in counter, I wondered how many of them could tell their children that they too had been on a flight when they were in secondary school. And how many of the kids realised what their parents - and teachers - had been through in life, so that they could go on this trip?

Did my children really understand what it meant when I told them that I had to wait until National Service before I took my first flight - to Taiwan, more in anticipation of the tough training ahead than the rest and recreation that was to follow.

Or that I had to wait until I was in the university hockey team to take my first train ride to Kuala Lumpur.

I cannot help but feel that our children these days - thanks to a fast moving world and an education system that strives to be the best - take such trips for granted.

That is what I told my son, when he said last month that he would be going on not one, but two, overseas trips this month.

"Well, Daddy, I am all set for November. I fly off to China on the 10th, return on the 24th and then I'll be off again on the 26th to Australia," he announced matter-of-factly.

The first is a service learning/immersion trip (yes, he studies Chinese as a third language), followed by a history field trip.

Yes, there is no doubt that he's going to benefit from both trips tremendously.

And it is not something just for a privileged few - most of his level in school are travelling overseas these holidays.

But do these kids think that because these trips are almost as frequent as examinations, they are part and parcel of life?

Life has changed, and it is changing at a pace that threatens to move the experiences of fathers like me into the trash folder.

Service learning for me was doing job week as a scout, helping visually handicapped people cross the street or going to help spruce up the then Cheshire Home for the less privileged in Changi on weekends.

It was learning to care for my niece and nephew when my brother passed on, and later to care for my ageing mother.

I never went to any other country to learn how to serve a fellow human being. These were lessons learnt at home, both in the specific and nationalist sense of the word.

I never had to go to China or India to "see" poverty, so that I could "appreciate" my life (as I am told by some teacher friends).

I experienced poverty first hand, yet appreciated what we had as a family.

My first academic field trip was when I was at the Institute of Education, learning how to take my students overseas.

It was not too long ago, that as a teacher, I conducted overseas history/geography field trips where I found myself learning as much as the kids.

But in those days, the kids had to raise most of the money themselves, either through advertisements or fund-raising activities or from benevolent old boys of the school.

Today's kids have more than enough in their Edusave or school-related globalisation funds to just pack up and go. And when there are insufficient funds, there is always the SAF (son and father) scholarship.

How much better will these activities make these pupils? How much better than me, my peers, or even my former students?

Only time will tell.

But life certainly has changed, and even in the worst of recessions, I'm sure parents, and schools, are going to protect these kids.

I only pray that they really understand, and appreciate, that.

This article was first published in The New Paper on Nov 9, 2008.