Teach Skills, Not Subjects!

Posted by on Oct 13, 2008 in learning | 4 comments

The title to this blog has been my personal mantra for many a year now.  It started as a suspicion in the back of my mind as I pondered my own wasted school experience.  But now I’m ready to shout it to all who want to listen.

Traditional education is a failure because its focus is on teaching information about subjects.  We are expected to memorise this information and then regurgitate it in an artificial exam setting.  Our reward for this exercise in tedium is a pretty bit of paper certificate.  The actual information we forget at our earliest possible convenience.  Any skills we happen to pick up that might be of use after school are secondary, almost an accidental by-product of the process.

That’s why, when we start working, we realize how little prepared we are for what’s out there.  And the training process must begin all over again.  And that’s why trainers like me have to teach people the basic A-B-Cs of communication and thinking skills for work.  They are learning this stuff for the first time.  Mostly, they don’t even know it exists.

Now it seems that the government is starting to see the light.  Under the title Call for skill lessons in school a BBC article reports on the realisation that ‘school pupils in England should study fewer formal subjects to allow more time for their personal and social development’.  And in case anyone thinks that these ‘lifestyle lessons’ would only provide soft options for kids, one of the issues mentioned was ‘thinking skills’!

Well, of course!  What’s the point of providing kids with all this information if they aren’t taught what to do with it?  How do you analyse and evaluation it?  How does it relate to other information?  How can it be applied and put to use?  Is there any way to create more information of our own?  These are the right questions to challenge kids with.  1066 is not enough.  It is a mere fact.  Facts can easily be acquired anytime… by someone of skill.

Right, rant over.  I’ll go away and calm down now, using my skill of emotional management.

Which I didn’t learn at school. :/

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  • JM

    Hi Allen – just surfed on to this excellent blog. I agree with you about learning in the school setting. It is merely an exercise in memorisation; and if by a stroke of luck you actually learn a skill in the process it’s an indirect effect, not the intended one.

    PS please edit “memorize” in the above – I do hate US-ified English!

    (Something i learned in school ;) ….)

  • http://www.sensei-winbeforehand.co.uk Dawn Baird, Partner

    As the unofficial editor of this blog, I’d like to state that I LIKE the ‘z’. However in this case, I will capitulate with grace.

  • http://www.franis.org/ Franis Engel

    Would like to hear more about – perhaps a real attempt? – to teach kids abstract thinking skills.
    The thing that inspired me was running across a little book named “PO, Guide to Creative Thinking” by Edward de Bono when I was 15. Since, I have seen de Bono’s course for middle school students in thinking that he designed for Venezuelan schools, called the “CORT Thinking Skills Program.” Excellent. You might want to check that out.
    A turning point for me in my own education was an independent study class in high school for History credits (also at 15.) I was assigned to read and compare the same historic event in multiple history books, after reading the original accounts of it. This one experience opened my eyes to how point of view is reflected in definitions of truth, people’s opinions & how value colors observations. This led me to investigate persuasive attempts to convince that is present in advertising, lessons, legalities & rants as well as the nature of communication in general. What I learned in that one comparative history experience was an excellent bit of education for the rest of my life.
    I realize I was very lucky to have had that. Sadly, for most people it’s a rare thing to be able to name every one “favorite” teacher in one’s education who actually taught a kid anything. I can name more than a handful!

  • http://www.sensei-winebforehand.co.uk Allen Baird, Partner

    Thanks Francis for your story. Although I’ve had a few competent teachers, I had none of the inspirational/life-changing kind. I feel that I’ve largely educated myself.

    My revelation came in the second year of my philosophy degree. I picked a module on Logic, which included a significant section in Informal Logic or what we now call Critical Thinking. This was my first hint that you could teach – and therefore learn – thinking as a skill. Then I discovered the wider topic of Study Skills, which includes critical evaluation but much more – how to memorise, learning styles, and the basics of creative thinking to name a few.

    I didn’t know whether to rejoice at finding this treasure-trove or explode in a rage that no-one had ever told me of its existence before!

    De Bono generally has a low view of the usefulness of teaching logical/critical thinking. But at its best I think it compliments his lateral/creative thinking methods. I am familiar with CoRT and think it is excellent too. The closest we have here is an AS exam that 16-18 year olds can do in Critical Thinking…if they happen to go to one of the few schools that teach it. The mentality is: (1) there must be a qualification at the end of it otherwise it is useless; and (2) the purpose of every level of education is simply to get to the next level and finally earn that precious bit of paper that says “degree”.

    For working-class boys like me who don’t give a stuff for fancy bits of paper, motivation to think for yourself, or to think at all, is zero.

    Having said this, I think there are primary/elementary schools here that are starting to teach Emotional Intelligence skills. Also, there are some high schools that teach financial literacy skills. So there are some rays of hope…

    Thanks again for sharing.

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