Customer Reviews

The Gap-Year Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit from Time Off Before or During College

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

'The Gap-Year Advantage: Helping your Child Benefit from Time Off Before or During College,' by Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson, is one of those unconventional offerings in the social-educational sphere that has the potential to ignite a mini-revolution and transform our society by changing the lives of individual young people in profound ways.

Today we never stop telling our kids how intelligent they are, how lucky they are to live in such a mobile, technologically advanced, and affluent society. Yet for all its abundance and limitless choices, today's world poses extraordinary challenges to our children. The ancient verities and old certainties are gone, leaving many kids confused, aimless, even self-destructive. The family, cultural, and societal norms that once helped them mature into functional adults have changed radically. We expect our children to go through twelve intensive years of primary and secondary school and then head off to college, now an absolute prerequisite for middle-class status and economic security.

Yet think for a moment what those twelve years do to our children. With few exceptions, the U.S. school system is based on the Prussian model imported by Horace Mann and Thomas Dewey in the late 19th Century, a system designed to mold obedient soldiers and acquiescent factory workers in the service of the Prussian state. Kids must endure a rigidly prescribed curriculum ladled out to them in regular fifty-minute intervals, during which they must sit obediently and receive spoon-fed knowledge passively, interrupted only by rigidly prescribed exams. The result in government schools, in particular, is often a loss of creativity, spontaneity, independent thinking, self-knowledge, and maturity, even if kids do manage to imbibe a degree of academic knowledge.

Enter the "gap year." This is the simple yet revolutionary idea that students should take a year off between high school and college, or during college, for a period of self-examination and self-discovery. The modality of that inner journey can be any number of things --- foreign travel, volunteer or community service work, or learning a new skill. The authors tell a vivid story of their son who embarked on a wonderful array of adventures before entering college to his great benefit, thus they write from practical experience as well as from an impressive knowledge base.

Though I never thought I'd face these same issues, I can attest to the wisdom of the gap year. My own son experienced burnout three-fourths of his way through college. Using the Haigler-Nelson book, we put together a gap year that involves working on a farm (and getting mentored in other ways at the same time), a six-week stint at Outward Bound's Wilderness Course, some non-traditional skills-training, and a month of independent study abroad. While my son hasn't yet finished his gap, he tells me he has more optimism about the future than he's felt in over a year.

'The Gap Year Advantage' is well-named, for the gap year confers real and practical advantages. It's not just a gap-year option or a gap-year substitute for the "real" business of formal education. Moreover, the book is far more than a mere catalogue of volunteer, service, study, or travel opportunities. It is well-written, at times even lyrically so, the obvious product of thoughtful and philosophically sophisticated people. In sum, it is a remarkable treatise on human development and an answer for some of the most troubling issues our kids face today. I wish my son had encountered the gap-year idea three years ago. For that matter, I wish I had encountered it forty years ago.

I have to disagree slightly with the other reviews here. I did not find that this was an excellent book, it was fair given my expectations, and there are many good lists of resources, organizations, and websites for options once you have decided to do a gap year or year off.

What I found missing in this book was a good discussion on the decision to take a gap year or year off. This may only apply to some people but I would think that a significant number of readers would be involved in the stage of trying to decide if a gap year is a good idea for them or their children. This is stage we are at and I did not find much in this book to stimulate ideas for progress in that decision process other than a few references to gap year consultant groups and some brief personal accounts of how students had decided themselves.

I will have to continue to search for information about how to help our son make this decision but once it is made this book will be a good resource for how to do the gap year.

Gives a soup-to-nuts overview of the options available for making full use of a gap year. Makes a good conversation starter to engage your child. I haven't checked out the resources, but I'm now confident that such resources exist (from cheap/free to more expensive options). Fast read.

The Gap Year Advantage is the most comprehensive and useful book about the benefits and realities of the Gap Year experience. As the parent of a student who did a gap year, we would have better prepared having read this book. Can't recommend it more highly.

I ordered this hoping to get a broad sampling of gap-year alternatives. While the book provided some lists that included affordable options such as City Year and AmeriCorp, the profiles of students were those who had lots of family money to travel/live internationally. Maybe unintentionally, the book puts the gap-year option in the realm of the affluent, and of the exceptionally bright, independent student.