Consider this travel joke: A couple has just returned from their vacation when a friend asks about their trip. "Where did you folks go for your holiday?" he wants to know. "Aruba," says the wife. "Oh," the friend says. "Where's that?" "I don't know," the husband replies with a shrug. "We flew." Thankfully, the days of the ignorant tourist are disappearing.

In fact, more and more tourists are choosing their destinations after thoroughly researching them and, in many cases, after making a conscious choice to learn from their travel experiences. Welcome to the growing world of educational travel.

The most recent study done on the subject, a 1988 survey conducted for the National Tour Assn., the largest group travel industry organization in North America, found that 93% of those queried believed that education and the opportunity to learn while traveling was an important consideration in their travel choices.

"Travel is educational, no matter where you go or what you do," said NTA President Tom Frankel, "but today there is an emphasis on traveling to learn."

There are dozens of museum-sponsored tours and even more specialized educational trips--i.e., instead of those ubiquitous large tour groups, these are small working expeditions of about 14 people or less, where the participants receive individual attention from instructors or tour guides.

Travelers can go to France, where a painting instructor teaches Monet's techniques; to Alaska, where an expert photographer leads working seminars on outdoor photo techniques, or to the Brazilian Amazon, where a team of biologists and geologists explain the impact of rain-forest destruction.

Not all educational travel trips can be considered part of the recent boom in eco-tourism (the Monet trip, for example), though eco-tourism definitely qualifies as educational travel.

Judy Spinelli, 40, an accounting technician in Las Vegas, is an education travel advocate. "I've had lots of vacations where I just hung out on the beach," she says. "But now, when I travel I want to explore, I want to learn. For the last 16 years, Spinelli has been doing just that. In 1975, she studied Indian artifacts in Mexico. In 1979, Spinelli traveled to Canada on a Greenpeace-sponsored trip aboard a research vessel to monitor the movement and size of the Orca whale migration. And last year, she joined a working expedition led by the Foundation for Field Research to the rain forest of Liberia.