Do not be fooled by the clutter, hype and phobia of the stories on poorly-life-skilled children! Life-skills trainings of children, and all the noise around it, are fairly wasted attention and energy! To cap it all, schools do not mind taking life-skills agenda to the top because it is (far) easier to ‘teach’ life-skills to children than get them to read copious volumes to literature and other subjects, keep them abreast of the formidable hierarchy of mathematical and scientific concepts and engage students in ‘Socratic conversations’ in academics.
Where did we, parents, learn life-skills? At home, community and school, and in that order. There’s no reason for our children to learn life-skills in any different way. Schools cannot teach life-skills meant to be taught at home and community.
How did we learn them? From adults role-models around us! Endlessly repeated performances and reminders of the skills. Why do we think our children can learn them ‘sans role models and repeated reminders?’ If we, parents, are poor role models for some of the life-skills, then teachers cannot be any better (they are also ‘mortal parents’ like us and hardly extra-equipped through training or education).
And what were the life skills we learnt while growing up in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s? Let us revisit them. The life-skills we learnt in those days could be categorised into three broad categories -– personal, social (community-living) and economic (‘technology of the times’) – and a sample of ten out of a long list are noted as under:
- Personal hygiene and health
- Personal value system (such as respect for others, integrity)
- Personal skill set (such as communication, team play)
- Literacy and numeracy (solid basic foundations in maths and languages)
- Social customs and living within a multi-cultural environment
- Civic duties and rights – local and global
- Scientific temperament and logical thinking
- Growing up with the ‘technologies of the times’ – cars, telephones, calculators, etc.
A brief note on ‘technologies of the times’ may be necessary:
No technology is ‘low tech’ without a competing context!
Cars and cal culators were not ‘low tech’ by themselves for those times, they are ‘low tech’ if we look back. All the ‘hi tech’ technologies of today will turn ‘low tech’ within years – that is the furious pace of the competing context of technology. Thus, we must not make too much noise about the inherent ‘hi-techness’ of the current technologies and our children being too stretched to deal with them.
Very interestingly, as if to prove the ‘low-techness’ of the current technologies, we just need to remind ourselves of the way children across socio-cultural and economic layers find the current mobile-based, internet services “child’s play”. It is ‘so low tech’ that only a miniscule fraction of children read the user instructions before using any application on the mobile Internet. The current technologies are no challenge for children across the world. - Easy integration with nature in all its forms
- Open personality (in the current context it may primarily imply the attitude of ‘being a learner’)
How have these values changed in the past decade? Nothing much really, except for the nuances. Broadly speaking, nothing has changed in the life-skills requirements of the young, not even the issues related to the ‘technologies of the times.’ Of course, technology has introduced nuances, which we find difficult to deal with, but they are not too alien for our children – yet, the nuances may well be explored with the children. For instance, the sensitivity towards all shades of cultural practices and symbols is now heightened and another bright spot of change is the respect for women as equal to men.
Are we certain that nothing needs to change in life-skills education? No. A couple of things need to change in life-skills education of children. First, what is definitely missing are the role-model adults – adults who know both the worlds; adults who know the entire context of the life-skills in their essence as well as the new nuances in the expression of the life-skills! And the lack of role-model adults cannot be replaced by a curriculum or periodic training sessions on life-skills by ‘one of them’ (young adults).
Second, the personalisation and globalisation wrought by mobile Internet has introduced new nuances to almost all of the life-skills. The new nuances are not known to children because they have no other context to compare with; we, parents, need to be extensively ‘educated’ on the new nuances. The knowledge of the new nuances is critical for us because we need to educate our children about the ‘contemporary form of the eternal life-skills’ by seamlessly integrating the ‘traditional essence’ and new nuances. To sum, it is not our children who need life-skills training but the adults – we, the parents (and teachers) need life-skills education to become (contemporary) role-model parents and adults!
