First steps in life skills education

Once the son of a millionaire asked his father: “Papa, since we have enough money, what will education do for me? Will it teach me how to earn more money?” The father replied, “Son, education will prepare you for life; earning money is only one of the things it will teach you.” Preparing for life means acquiring skills which will help an individual live life to the full. The skills needed for successful living are known as life skills. According to the Wikipedia “Life skills are the skills necessary for successful living, whether that be with a family, career or institution.” In 1997, the World Health Organisation (WHO) enumerated the life skills an individual needs to develop to lead an optimal or near-optimal existence. They are: self-awareness, empathy, problem solving, decision making, effective communication, interpersonal relations, creative thinking, critical thinking, coping with emotions, and coping with stress. In recent years, several institutions and organisations claiming expertise in developing life skills of children and adults have mushroomed. Although there is no closure on the issue of whether we need separate classes for life skills training or should they be included in regular school curriculums, there is an emerging consensus on the necessity for life skills education. In UNICEF’s view, “Life skills-based education is a critical component of quality education. It can enhance the value of traditional subjects, such as literacy and numeracy, as well as topics of increasing relevance to young people, including human rights, gender equality and peace.” This viewpoint is endorsed by the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCERT, 2000). “Education, by and large, suffers basically from the gap between its content and the living experience of students. Education must ideally prepare students to face the challenges of life. For this, it needs to be intimately linked with life skills, the abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life, by developing in them generic skills related to a wide variety of areas such as health and social needs,” says the framework charter. According to NCFSE, life skills are temporal, spatial and contextual. “There are certain core life skills, such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, self-awareness, coping with stress, decision-making, creative thinking and generative thinking, interpersonal relationships and empathy. These are of enormous importance for successful living.” Yet quite obviously, life skills cannot be developed in one or two days. To incorporate them into education systems, we have to make our classrooms and pedagogies life skills oriented, irrespective of the subject being taught. Every subject can be infused with life skills content. Indeed it’s exigent to make our classroom instruction and evaluation system life skills oriented. This can be done in several ways. Some examples: • Forming new words. Children need to be encouraged to develop new words which could be a combination of two existing words e.g egoflute, ‘He is blowing his egoflute’. Such exercises will sharpen critical thinking and creativity. After all words are not God sent,…