Reasons for the prevalence of active tourism and motivation of students of general secondary education institutions to engage in active tourism

Abstract

Today, a significant number of leading experts are inclined to believe that tourist clubs and children's tourist centers with their infrastructure are extremely effective in increasing the level of physical activity of schoolchildren. Various forms of tourism and local history work in Ukraine cover more than 1 million 250 thousand children, which is 19.1% of the total number of students. Almost 536 thousand students study tourism and local history in out-of-school education institutions annually. Tourism and recreational activities remain one of the most common forms of leisure for modern youth. As we can see, the phenomenon of active tourism among children requires reflection by the scientific community in order to optimize it and implement it on an institutional basis as a successful form of physical education. In order to properly implement and disseminate this phenomenon, it is necessary to understand, among other things, the reasons for its popularity. We have conducted an analytical review of the functions of active tourism, which we have found in the scientific literature on active, sports, health and recreational tourism. All of the functions mentioned in these studies do not explain the uniqueness and popularity of active tourism, either together or in particular. The functions taken from the philosophy of tourism have added clarity, but the main function is qualitatively described in the ideology of ecological tourism. Our analytical study allows us to identify the function of active tourism that makes it unique and popular - the possibility of merging with (almost) unchanged nature. Other functions of active tourism (health (physiological), wellness (psychological), recreational, entertainment, cognitive, educational, sense of discovery, sense of social authenticity) are decisive all together, in a complex, and not each separately, since each of them is duplicated in other, (not so popular or not at all) areas of life, and together they add effective reasons and impetus for the effective functioning of the root cause of active tourism - the merger of man with nature.