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

by Rae Nelson and Karl Haigler

Book Overview

"I'm not ready for college yet..." Those words need not cause panic and fear for parents. Taking time off before or during college is no longer the road less traveled for many students in the United... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312336985
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.6" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

comprehensive overview

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.

Take Advantage of 'The Gap Year Advantage'

'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

great insight and information for parents and students

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.