These days a parent, traveler or journalist finding out new genre international, well-ranked personal or aspiration schools need only to walk into the headmaster’s workplace to learn that his college prides itself on dispensing life skills education to its students.
Even lately, value education and life skills have become the new mantra of education, not only in India but worldwide. Educational workers, lifestyle gurus, skill development ngo‘s and business management experts have suddenly discovered that without well-developed life skills, even the brightest and best students are doomed to shallows and misery.
What kind of skills is required?
However among educationists, life-style gurus and also the growing world community of wisdom dispensers — may their tribe increase — there’s significant confusion regarding the sort of life skills that require to be instructed within the country’s schools, colleges, and better education establishments. Some skill development ngo‘s advocate is the importance of supplementary skills like speech, digital learning, and science genius. Others specialize in active skills like motor mechanics, carpentry, home physical science, yoga, music, dance, and sports specialization, whereas some provide importance to a plain personal manner. Clearly, parents and students are confused.
History of life skills
Value education and life skills were extremely valued within the post-Renaissance centuries right up to the commercial revolution. Writers of the Renaissance era and also the European enlightenment like Shakespeare, Balzac, Voltaire, and Austen demonstrated that upward social mobility was not possible without fine speech, cultivated tastes in music and dance, and formal manners. However, when the commercial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, life skills learning declined in importance as advancement of technology and business management skills — capability to mobilise land, labour and capital to leaven with enterprise — assumed bigger significance and high accomplishment in science, mathematics, engineering and management became the conditions of upward socio-economic quality.
Social skills
Although the good majority of headmasters/principals of unranked colleges and schools — and their unfortunate students — are unaware, the times of intensive educational learning and excessive deference to white Caucasians while putting down Africans and South-east Asians are over. In its broadest sense, life skills education is concerning practicing creative thinking, innovation, manners, cultural sensitivity and developing social relations with a cross-section of individuals of all colors, ethnicities, and cultures and arguably, developing lasting international friendships over a couple of drinks, a game of billiards or a round of golf.
Important skills at a workplace
At its annual 2016 conference in Davos, the World Economic Forum released its the future of Jobs Report that highlighted the use, skills, and workforce development ways of the future. The report supported interviews with chief human resources and strategy managers of leading world corporates, listed the top ten skills which will be very important to achieve workplaces of 2020. They include problem-solving, vital thinking, creativity, self-discipline, emotional sustainability, judgment and decision-making, service orientation, negotiation skills, and cognitive flexibility.
India’s schools, top-ranked private schools included, don’t seem to be doing enough to develop the soft skills of their students. That’s why several academically bright Indian students within the best foreign universities realize it troublesome to cope. They have a tendency to lack self-assurance, empathy, leadership and analytical capability to unravel issues.
