Kristof Voices Support for Bridge Year in “Half the Sky”

On Monday, Nick Kristof was in Palo Alto as the keynote speaker for Castilleja School’s “Global Week”, where Global Citizen Year will present on Friday.  Kristof presented a message to the students that, in short, goes like this:

• You’ve all won the lottery of life in the US and the winning ticket comes with real obligations
• Helping people is hard – harder than it looks.
• Recommends spending enough time to get a “nitty gritty sense at the grass roots of how things really work”, “Outside your comfort zone”.  Makes people/issues real – in a way you’ll always remember.
• Don’t be daunted. Each person counts, like the old parable “There are thousands of starfish…every one counts”

Kristof’s new book, Half the Sky, addresses broader systemic issues as he outlines the failure of the American education system to adequately prepare young people to take on the tough challenges of our time.

“One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a ‘gap year’ or by studying abroad. If more Americans [did this]….our entire society would have a richer understanding of the world around us. And the rest of the world might also hold a more positive view of Americans”

And here, he voices support for international versions of already successful domestic service programs such as Teach For America.

“It would be useful if there were better mechanisms for people to donate time. The Peace Corps is a valuable program, but it requires and intimidating commitment of 27 months, and the schedule does not follow the academic year…Teach for America has generated enormous interest among public service-minded young people, but it is a domestic program. We need funding for Teach the World, an international version of Teach for America, to send young people abroad for a year…That would offer an important new channel of foreign assistance to support girls’ education in poor countries, and it would also offer young Americans a potentially life-changing encounter with the developing world.”

What if American universities actually made it a requirement for each student to spend time living in a developing country before college, as Kristoff suggests? Thousands of young people would enter college hungry for the resources to learn how to solves some of our generation’s most pressing challenges and equipped with a rich set of experiences to give context to what they learn.  Because – after all – truly helping people is often harder than it looks.

Tags: bridge year, Kristof, take a gap year