Gap year should be made compulsory

From Prof C.W. Watson.

Sir, In saying that “volunteering is a two-way exchange”, Gillian Tett (“Navigating the cultural minefield around modern aid”, March 17) rightly makes us aware of the positive educational value of gap-year projects, which allow students to experience a different way of life, the lasting impression of which will in some cases determine an individual’s future orientation.

It should be a compulsory rite of passage for all those working in the field of development, as James Wolfensohn tried to make it for employees at the World Bank. Too many people working on poverty alleviation programmes here in Indonesia, for example, have little idea of what it is to experience poverty, but it is only through that experience that efficacious policies can be properly designed, a point well made in the interview with Esther Duflo in Lunch with the FT.

But even those who are not the “wealthy western students” that Ms Tett describes can acquire a good proxy knowledge through studying social anthropology. It is a discipline that seeks not only to present the facts and figures of economic and social development, but also stresses the need for acquiring an intimacy, through sympathetic understanding, with the thoughts and emotions of communities very different from our own, as I hope she would agree.

C.W. Watson, Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia