A gap year is a widely accepted post-high-school option, more common in Europe than in North America but gaining traction here as well: students take a year to work, travel, pursue interests, and generally get a better sense of who they are before beginning college.
As a university instructor, I’ve found freshmen who took gap years to be light-years ahead of their classmates in their ability to profit from their classes. [Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education, W. W. Norton & Co., 2018, p. 31]
[My] proposed reorganization of the educational system involves one further innovation which, in my judgment, is an essential ingredient of the plan. It consists in the introduction of a scholastic hiatus, either for two years or four, between the completion of basic schooling and the beginning of advanced schooling in institutions of higher learning. …
The hiatus is designed to serve a threefold purpose: (1) to interrupt the continuity of schooling and save the young from the scholastic ennui that results from too many successive years of sitting in classrooms and doing their lessons; (2) to counteract the delayed maturity induced by too many years of continuous schooling and thus to remedy some of the disorders of adolescence; and (3) to populate our institutions of higher learning with students who have gained a certain degree of maturity through the experiences afforded them by nonscholastic employments, as well as with students who return to educational institutions for further schooling because they have a genuine desire for further formal study and an aptitude for it, instead of students who occupy space in our higher institutions as the result of social pressures or because to continue on with more schooling is following the path of least resistance. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 136-137]
[M]any people get much more from college if they do something else before they go. I used to teach in a university in England, and I often found that the so-called mature students—those who were taking programs after other work experience—applied themselves with more energy to their studies than younger students who’d gone straight from school. This was because they knew why they were taking the program and were determined to get as much as possible from it. [Ken Robinson, Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, Viking / Penguin, 2013, pp. 183-185]
Five years of research have proven … that people who take a gap year get in less trouble, are more likely to graduate on time, do little if any binge drinking, and have higher GPAs. Young men in particular, seem to benefit from the extra year. … Students who don’t have enough money for college or want to avoid debt can work for a year or two first. …
Aside from better grades, taking a gap year sets college seniors up to tell a great story about themselves when it comes time for the job hunt … [about how they] made a deliberate choice to go out into the world and do something entirely different for a year. …
[A]s Abby Falik, the founder of Global Citizen Year, puts it: Gap years are bridge years; a well-engineered connection between one life stage and another; a deliberate pause that is nevertheless not silent or still but filled with something other than what would happen inside a classroom. Students may well find that a gap year will be a bridge to getting so much more per hour, per dollar, out of college than they ever thought possible. [Ron Lieber, The Price You Pay For College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make, Harper Collins, 2021, pp. 226-229]
[I]n Europe many young people travel, are involved in political activity, move in and out of the universities, and do many different kinds of work. When it comes to young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, we are much more anxious to push them into the job market than people are in the Western Europe …
I think it would be greatly to the benefit of our culture and the quality of our lives to let up a bit, slow down, learn more, and acquire less. There’s nothing wrong, for example, in taking a year off from college to travel or do community or environmental work or manual labor. The more experience young people have, the more sensibly they can use educational opportunities and integrate what they learn with what they do. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times Books / Random House, 1989, p. 81]
[T]he school has been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary conditions and motives of life, … [it is] the one place in the world where it is most difficult to get experience … [John Dewey, The School and Society, 1899, U of Chicago P, 1932, pp. 14-15, https://archive.org/details/schoolsociety00dewerich]
Only through the trials of adult life, only with the range and depth of experience that makes for maturity, can human beings become educated persons. The mature may not be as trainable as the immature, but they are more educable by virtue of their maturity.
Education is a lifelong process of which schooling is only a small but necessary part. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, pp. 9-10]
Taking the time to get off autopilot and to be intentional about decisions is a great growth opportunity. Many students who take gap years spend the time focusing on their interest—be it through a wildlife research study or language immersion school or community service of some kind—and are better suited to study that interest and turn it into a career. Others gain practical, real-world experience or military experience that better prepares them to be adults they in fact are. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 300]
[S]uppose half a dozen of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges … would announce that … they required for admission a two-year period, after high school, spent in some maturing activity. …
By “maturing activity” could be meant: working for a living, … community service, … Peace Corps, … a course of purposeful travel, … independent enterprise in art, business, or science, away from home, with something to show for the time spent.
The purpose of this proposal is twofold: to get students with enough life-experience to be educable on the college level, especially in the social sciences and humanities; and to break the lockstep of twelve years of doing assigned lessons for grades, so that the student may approach his college studies with some intrinsic motivation, and therefore perhaps assimilate something that might change him. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 124-125]
There is no comprehension apart from romance. It is my strong belief that the cause of so much failure in the past has been due to the lack of careful study of the due place of romance. Without the adventure of romance, at the best you get inert knowledge without initiative, and at the worst you get contempt of ideas—without knowledge.
But when this stage of romance has been properly guided another craving grows. The freshness of inexperience has worn off; there is general knowledge of the groundwork of fact and theory: and, above all, there has been plenty of independent browsing amid firsthand experiences, involving adventures of thought and of action. The enlightenment which comes from precise knowledge can now be understood. [Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, 1929, Williams and Norgate, 1955, pp. 52-53]
We commonly see adolescents and young adults go off to college without having had much of an opportunity to make decisions about the things that matter, including how they want to structure their time, what they want to commit their energy to, or whether they want to be in school at all. Not surprisingly, they have difficulty setting and meeting goals and making good decisions when it comes time to pick classes or a major or more generally to manage their day. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 61-62]
Colleges do not provide the experience or the breadth of vision that allow young people to get a feel for what they might love to do with their lives. In fact, for many youngsters college is a distraction, a delaying tactic, a way of putting off deciding upon a life’s work for another four years after high school. Unfortunately, that delay can become extended throughout life, and many people live either without having discovered what they would like to make their life’s work or discover it too late to do it. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times Books / Random House, 1989, p. 9]
The ideal college would be a kind of educational retreat in which you could try to find yourself; find out what you like and want; what you are and are not good at. People would take various subjects, attend various seminars, not quite sure of where they were going, but moving toward the discovery of vocation, and once they found it, they could then make good use of technological education. The chief goals of the ideal college, in other words, would be the discovery of identity, and with it, the discovery of vocation.
What do we mean by the discovery of identity? We mean finding out what your real desires and characteristics are, and being able to live in a way that expresses them. You learn to be authentic, to be honest in the sense of allowing your behavior and your speech to be the true and spontaneous expression of your inner feelings. [Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971, Penguin, 1993, p. 176, https://www.slideshare.net/imbangjtrenggana/abraham-h-maslow-the-farther-reaches-of-human-nature-penguin-nonclassics-1993]
If parents understand that by the design of our natures we are intended to evolve toward autonomy, and if they choose to support and align themselves with this process, then they will want to be sensitive to opportunities for nurturing competence and self-responsibility. [Nathaniel Branden, Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, 1996, Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 34-35]
Parents: … [C]onsider the opportunity of a change in the schedule, or any change in [your children’s] status or roles—for example, the start of summer, the start of the school year, the transition from elementary to secondary school, or from secondary school to college, and so on. In those moments, we can mark the transition across the threshold by resetting expectations. We can say, Now that you are […] you’re a different, more mature person, and that means that our relationship has to evolve. Now is a good time to talk about what will be new, what you can expect from me, and what I expect from you. … [Y]ou can mark this by doing something special … You can take them to a new restaurant, or on a trip … You may be surprised how much significance you can convey with a small gesture that makes the entrance to a new era feel different. …
We need to signal clearly that something new and different is possible. … Cultural rituals … can send the message that This is different, you can be a new and different student from this moment, you can accomplish more than you thought possible. [David Yeager, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2024, pp. 365-368]
[T]here is a vast difference between schooling intermitted in life on a farm or in a city with plenty of small jobs, and schooling that is a child’s only “serious” occupation and often his only adult contact. Thus, a perhaps outmoded institution has become almost the only allowable way of growing up. And with this pre-emping, there is an increasing intensification of the one narrow experience, e.g. in the shaping of the curriculum and testing according to the increasing requirements of graduate schools far off in time and place. Just as our American society as a whole is more and more tightly organized, so its school system is more and more regimented as part of that organization. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, p. 17-18]
To … make active, competent, and initiating citizens who can produce a community culture and a noble recreation, we need a very different education than the schooling that we have been getting.
Large parts of it must be directly useful, rather than useless and merely aiming at status. …
On the whole, the education must be voluntary rather than compulsory, for no growth to freedom occurs except by intrinsic motivation. Therefore the educational opportunities must be various and variously administered. We must diminish rather than expand the present monolithic school system. …
Unlike the present inflexible lockstep, our educational policy must allow for periodic quitting and easy return to the scholastic ladder, so that the young have time to find themselves and to study when they are themselves ready. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 61-62]
In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman. …
Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. [John Gatto, “The Psychopathic School,” 1990, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society, 2005, pp. 25-26, 33]
At no other time or place in history have people believed that continuous schooling was the obvious means to prepare most youth for most careers… Many of these careers require a lot of study. Some of them need academic teaching. But it was never thought useful to give academic teaching in such massive and continuous doses as the only regimen. …
[A]t present, facing a confusing future of automated technology, excessive urbanization, and entirely new patterns of work and leisure, the best educational brains ought to be devoting themselves to devising various means of educating and paths of growing up, appropriate to various talents, conditions, and careers. We should be experimenting with different kinds of school, no school at all, the real city as school, farm schools, practical apprenticeships, guided travel, work camps, little theaters and local newspapers, community service. Many others, that other people can think of. Probably more than anything, we need a community, and community spirit, in which many adults who know something, and not only professional teachers, will pay attention to the young. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 139-141]
[Students] respond more fully and more intelligently when they make direct contact with the community and are allowed to choose roles that have some utility for the community and themselves. What is at stake here, I suppose, is the freedom of volition, for this is the basic condition with which people must learn to deal, and the sooner they achieve within that condition wit, daring, and responsibility the stronger they will be. It seems absurd to postpone the assumption of that condition as long as we do. In most other cultures, and even in our own past, young people have taken upon themselves the responsibility of adults and have dealt with it as successfully as most adults do now. The students I have seen can do that, too, when given the chance. What a strain it must be to have that capacity, to sense in one’s self a talent for adventure or growth or meaning, and have that sense continually stifled or undercut by the role one us supposed to play.
Thus, it seems inescapably clear that our first obligation to the young is to create a place in the community for them to act with volition and freedom. They are ready for it, certainly, even if we aren’t. Adolescents seem to need at least some sense of risk and gain “out there” in the world: an existential sense of themselves that is vivid to the extent that the dangers faced are “real.” … Many wanted to work or travel and others did not; they wanted to sit and think or read or live alone or swim … They returned from these experiences immeasurably brightened and more sure of themselves, more willing, in that new assurance, to learn many of the abstract ideas we had been straining to teach them. It was not simply the experience in itself that brought this about. It was also the feeling of freedom they had, the sense that they could come and go at will and make any choice they wanted—no matter how absurd—if they were willing to suffer what real consequences followed. [Peter Marin, “The Open Truth and Fiery Vehemence of Youth,” 1969, The Cosmos Reader, edited by Edgar Z. Friedenberg et al., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 815-816]
[M]uch of the energy that sometimes goes to thinking about individual children might better be devoted to discovering some worthwhile activity and to arrange the conditions under which it can be carried forward. [John Dewey, “Progressive Education and the Science of Education,” 1928, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, U of Chicago P, 1974, p. 176-177]
Related:
– How can parents improve their influence on their children?
– Why is it important for young people to take on responsibility? What opportunities do they have for substantive responsibility?