Gap-Year Students Are No Good To Anyone
“GAP-year students told to forget aid projects,” say the Times’ front-page headline.
There’s a picture of Prince Harry, who took a gap from getting plastered in Boujis and playing soldiers, tending a garden in Lesotho.
Interesting to note that back home in Houses Clarence and Highgrove there is an Army of gardeners tending plants. In Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall estate, there are people expert in making organic jam and chutney.
Was there no room for Harry in the Windsors’ garden party? Better perhaps had the Palace sent one of these trained horticulturalists to Africa than an unskilled teenager, and taught the boy a trade back home.
The Voluntary Service Overseas is concerned that gap-year projects benefit no-one aside from the travel companies that organise them and the youths looking for an experience.
Do-gooding teens can feel superior to their peers backpacking working a bar in Faliraki and selling timeshare in Marbella by paying £2,400 to work on a South African horse safari and £1,895 “observing coral and marine life in Borneo”.
Readers learn of the volunteer to Mexico who paid to work on a conservation project and spent six months behind a desk inputting data. And there’s the volunteer teacher who discovered that her placement had led to the real teacher being made redundant.
Meanwhile, Harry is putting his gardening skills to good use by crawling in the undergrowth and showing a photographer his haymaker…
Posted: 14th, August 2007 | In: Broadsheets Comments (5) | TrackBack | Permalink
