It's frowned upon in Canada, but a rite of passage in Europe. ALANNA MITCHELL looks at how doing civic service between high school and university may improve education
by Alanna Mitchell
Saturday, February 7, 2004 - The Globe & Mail, Page F7
By the time he reached the age of 20, Julien Ayoub had been on a 15-year non-stop study sprint, including the first two years of his undergraduate degree in Montreal. And he was tired. So tired, he wasn't sure he could carry on.
He began talking to his parents about taking some time off, but they were adamantly opposed. "They said: 'Why waste a semester? If you stay in school, you'll finish earlier.' "
He persevered. Finally, they agreed to let him participate in Katimavik, Canada's main government-sponsored program to introduce young people to the world of volunteering. He worked at a hospital in New Brunswick, a centre for the elderly in Saskatchewan and in a middle school in Ontario. It changed his life.
"In all my life, I just studied, studied, studied. Doing this was just amazing," he said. "During those seven months, I learned more than during all my years of high school, CEGEP and university. I learned about life."
In most industrialized countries, taking a gap year to do something useful between high school and college or university is a cherished rite of passage. Prince William built pathways in Chile during his, and Prince Harry worked as a farmhand in the Australian Outback last year and is to spend several months in Africa this year, during his break after high school.
In fact, in some of the 40 countries involved in the International Association for National Youth Service, the gap year is mandatory, to be spent either in the military or in volunteer work.
Germany is just now in the throes of a national debate over whether to phase out obligatory military service for men just out of high school and replace it with service in the social sector for the whole younger generation. A recent poll suggested that 70 per cent of Germans support a compulsory year of volunteering in social services such as hospitals. It's being pitched as a way to build a sense of community and social responsibility.
But in Canada, taking a gap year is still considered heretical. Just look at all the high-school students across Canada who have been scrambling to make yesterday's deadline to apply to Ontario's universities, anxious to avoid the stigma of taking a year off.
The closest Canadian young people get to performing institutionalized volunteer work is in Ontario, where they must do 40 hours of service before they are permitted to graduate, a requirement established in 1999 with the new curriculum. As well, young Canadians in Alberta, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland are participating in Global Youth Service Day in mid-April.
There is a movement here to make the gap year not only more acceptable, but also respected. At the head of the push are Jean-Guy Bigeau, the executive director of Katimavik, and Justin Trudeau, chairman of Katimavik's board of directors.
Katimavik, founded in 1977, is Canada's representative to the International Association for National Youth Service. A measure of the difficulty Mr. Bigeau and Mr. Trudeau may face in gaining wide acceptance of the idea of taking a year to volunteer is the fact that Katimavik, though wildly popular, was killed off in 1986 by the federal government and only partly reinstated in 1995.
This is not, as Mr. Trudeau pointed out, a plan to urge students to "bum around" or work in a low-paying job. Instead, the duo aim to persuade the federal government to establish a program to help Canadians in their late teens do a prolonged stint of volunteering either in Canada or in foreign countries. And not only that: They want to foster a national discussion on the merits of the gap year and help Canadians understand its benefits.
"There is a need for such a debate to happen," Mr. Bigeau said, adding that young Canadians tell him frequently that they feel pressure to begin a career as quickly as possible and not take time away from studies.
Mr. Trudeau, who was a Grade 12 teacher, is also familiar with the phenomenon of watching students head straight to university after high school. He said it has become de rigueur in Canada.
"It seems to be a way of pushing off the real world," he said, adding that students in that frame of mind may not be able to appreciate fully all that the academic world has to offer. The result is often a costly switch of programs partway through the degree or even dropping out of university.
And when you combine that with the sense of disenfranchisement many young Canadians feel, it fuels the need -- in the view of Mr. Trudeau -- to help them connect with their society. "There is a need for people to get out there and understand that every single individual matters," he said. "And that what we do shapes the world."