Taking a gap year

is still considered "controversial". 
   "It's like a year long holiday" and "they get out of the work habit". Then there is "they can't afford to be a year behind everyone else" and "maths students should never take a year out" or "if they are really serious then they will just get on with it " and "it looks bad on a c.v. - employers don't like that sort of thing".
Ms W has a close friend whose older brother has just finished school. He should do well...and he is off on a gap year. He's going to Italy - which is where his grandparents came from - and he is going to "brush up" his Italian and get to know his extended family and work at the vineyards they own. When he comes back he plans to go to university.
His parents support the idea but they have been criticised for doing so. His sister, Ms W's friend, told me that, even with plans in place, his parents are being told that he shouldn't do it. He should go straight to university. I saw his mother briefly when she came to pick her daughter up and she raised her eyes to the sky and said,
     "We think it might be very good for him. He wants to go. He's going."
I said, "It's a plane journey away - and if you can't trust your cousins who can you trust."
She smiled and said,
       "It's just as well they have grown up."
Yes, I've heard a tale or two about their escapades when young.
But I thought of all that this morning when I saw a small piece in the paper where a large proportion of university graduates are saying their degrees were "a waste of time". They are not using the knowledge gained. 
It makes me wonder yet again whether a "gap year" should be compulsory for everyone.  (If it really is a problem with maths students then make arrangements accordingly.) I certainly think language students should head off for a year and live in the country of the language or languages they will be studying. It would undoubtedly raise their level of understanding of the language. Almost any other choice of career will benefit from learning to get along with a greater variety of people and experiencing new ideas and places even within your own country. A gap year working abroad will help you grow up - fast. 
There was a girl living not far from us who was "just fed up with study". Her results were excellent but it had been very hard work for her. She told me, "I can't just keep it up for another four years. I need a break."
Against the wishes of her family she did take one. She used the money she had saved from her part time job, bought a plane ticket and headed off to Europe and a job working with a family. The first job did not work out. She actually feared for her safety. It almost made her head home but the agency she had applied to took her worries seriously - indeed very seriously - and they offered her another position. She didn't look back then. The family was busy and often chaotic. She was the one who had to organise and remind and get things done.  They didn't want her to leave and they still keep in touch. 
     "It was the best thing I could have done," she told me on her return. 
Her brother backpacked through Europe doing menial jobs a couple of years later and decided not to go to university at the end of it. It took him some years to decide what he wanted to do and he is now doing a degree part time in an entirely different field from his original likely choice. "The first idea would have been a big mistake," he once told me.
I know not everyone can do it - and not everyone wants to. Not everyone will have a positive experience or learn something from it either. Perhaps though it would be wise to make it the expected thing. If someone decides they don't want to go to university at the end of it then is that necessarily a bad thing?