Dillon Waugh
Hayes
English 100 – 9:10
2/10/13
Word Count: 773
Gap Year – Critique
#3
Educational “gap years” are far more common outside of the
United States than within. With their frequency elsewhere increases their
controversy, and in an article in the Guardian, Suzanne Moore takes her
position in that controversy in Britain claiming that whether or not taking a
gap year has any measurable professional benefit is moot – if a student feels
that taking a break in their formal education has benefitted them in a personal
sense, then it was worth enough. While I myself don’t think it ought to be
thought of quite so simply, Moore makes her argument boldly and bluntly, and
from a rather different perspective from which the matter is often approached
in journalism, all the while scoffing in naysayers’ faces.
She does this, mind, without “dumbing down” their arguments
so much as turning them around. She points to surveys taken in the United
Kingdom seeking to test the potential impact of gap years, and then calls their
purpose into question. On one hand, studies have suggested that students who take
gap years may – just may – make less in their professions than students who
soldier on through their educations. Should one take that to mean that gap
years are more problematic than they’re worth? According to Moore, to assume so
is to assume that “If something
cannot be costed, measured, assessed and shown to have direct financial
benefit, don't do it. Ever. The meaning of life is money.”
In fact,
reflecting upon her own experiences out of school at the age of sixteen, she
implicitly poses that deviating from the straight-and-clear expedient path
through university to career proves that one cares less about success in the
system than life itself. She calls her own period outside of the ever-testing
system as one “where life does not run smoothly or predictably”, a noble and
practical test and conditioning, “where risks have been taken, where things
have not worked out”, and yet “where books have been read for pleasure, where
feelings have been felt, not graded, where we have ventured out of any comfort zone.”
A gap year enriches, teaches, and helps one find one’s place in a way off the
usual scales and measurements.
Moore also
assures that the events of a gap year needn’t fulfill any ambitious plans: a
student needn’t travel, run a business or organization, or volunteer. It’s
enough that they learn to live outside of the measurements and standards that
they’ve been pressured yet guided by in a course on which they’ve been baited
and run. Therefore, a person needn’t have any special means, connections, or certain
course to find a bit of themselves on a gap year – but she does not seem to
consider that if one has a choice, it’s better not to go into a free year blind
any more than it is better to go into most anything else in such a state. It
would do no good to pigeonhole oneself off the bat – isn’t that partly why many
consider taking gap years instead of jumping to university in the first place,
after all? But I would certainly feel more secure in, in a figurative sense,
seeing a friend board a plane to a foreign country with, if not a schedule that
may be compromised by poor weather for travel, a list of places across the
territory they’ve confirmed they can stay in certain weeks until their return
home. Goals and plans help provide direction from a start, but they needn’t
rule all.
The
hoorah-free-spirits, damn-the-standards character in Moore’s piece does give it
its charm, if not a sense of complete awareness, and it makes its impression
from the beginning in her presenting and then head-on bull-clashing the
research comparing students who take gap years to students who stay the
educational course, and while her aforementioned accusations on attempts to
measure financial and professional success are indeed provocative, she leaves a
few of the others – studies suggesting that students who take gap years are
more likely to have played truant or experimented with marijuana than those who
do not – mentioned but untouched. There is a bit in them to touch upon – do
they really prove anything about gap years by recording behavior before high
school graduation age? Do they perhaps say something about the mindset of gap
year students that demands sympathy and proves just how much some deserve and
even need the option to take some time away – that they are experimentally-minded,
that constant subject to pushes and pulls by structure drives them mad?
Moore needn’t
attempt to answer those questions, of course, in her piece – but perhaps she
could have asked them rhetorically herself.
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