Preparation for Essay 2 - Gap Years - Critique of Source #1

Dillon Waugh

Hayes

English 100 – 9:10

2/4/13

Word Count: 600

Gap Year - Critique #1

The claim that David Burstein sells an article in the Huffington Post assures that students are well-advised to take a gap year following high school graduation, during which they may pursue interests and mull over colleges and universities to attend afterward. While my stance is for the most part in agreement with his, I find his argument to be insecure, as it stresses the potential for achievement over a gap year without demonstrating awareness of possible risks or causes for skepticism, but it gains as much as it loses from its rather personal nature.

The lack of addressed possible counterarguments is, in my opinion, the most obvious place in which something is missing from Burstein’s column – in fact, he only implicitly touches on them by re-emphasizing previously-mentioned pressure on American students to focus on and persist with formal education and urging one to think of a gap year as a period of independent education rather than a “break” (suggesting therefore that one may be skeptical due to considering a gap year, in theory, to be an unaffordable break from diligent pursuit of education). That is not the column’s only weakness: Burstein provides little detailed proof in the potential for enrichment and valuable experience in a gap year, asserting that in theory such a period allows recent high school graduates who’ve known only how to live as students their entire mature lives to have a year’s trial living in the “real world” instead of having to adjust to it all at once after a few more years of schooling, pointing out that gap years are common among students in other countries without suggestion of their effects or lack of negative consequences. What details he does provide are anecdotal – he describes what a handful of specific individuals accomplished during gap years.

Burstein’s points are no less solid in their understandability, if they lack equally firm backing. He offers the usual proposed benefit of waiting to attend college, which is time to think or decide on what one feels they want to pursue without rushing along collecting classes and selecting majors and minors into and through university, only for the position they worked themselves into to feel all wrong and force them to tear out their roots and start from scratch midway through their lifespans. His somewhat less-common point on giving students a taste of life experience is reasonable. And his examples on the life rewards of a few successful gap years, although they lack scope to suggest that it’s probable, do indeed prove that a gap year can be rewarding. No less, one of the gap years well-spent that Burstein describes is his own, which lends his argument the charm and earnestness in belief that personal experience can. Should that fail, however, Burstein does also have a safety cushion in, if not disproving naysayers, compromising with them: he does not discourage students from keeping school someplace on their minds. They can start applying for university before they’ve received their high school diplomas if they like – but they can spend some of a free year ascertaining which school’s acceptance letter is the one that means most to them, or collecting a few more.

On that note, it’s also of interest to me that some of the gap year accomplishments that Burstein describes seem rather ambitious – he references that he “made” (presumably wrote and directed) a film, while another wrote a novel, while yet another worked on building a school in Kenya. Perhaps it would be just as wise for a student to plan ahead for their gap year as for their secondary education.