Life skills Education - The Need of the Hour

LIFE SKILLS EDUCATION –THE NEED OF THE HOUR

The emerging competitive society which calls for real time performance and proven record of knowledge and skills is indirectly contributing to a latent stress among the growing children. Failure is increasingly becoming unacceptable and the race for success puts tremendous pressure on compromising with the means to reach the ends. An unfair practice is justified as intelligent or clever way of manipulating the process to reach the goal, and thus oftentimes stands celebrated! The younger generation are tutored to find quick-fix ways of solving problems rather than the right ways!

All these call for a review of our system in the K-12 sector – why we are doing what we are doing! Life skills education, in this context, finds an important place in the learning domains of school systems, not in addition to the existing curriculum, but as a vital and central part of the curriculum. The focus of the early Indian system of education was to infuse a set of core life skills so that the learner could face life with a sense of confidence and conviction.

One vital component of any such learning should be self-organization and self-discipline. In the absence of effective role models in a country that is torn with “free for all” conceptualization of the process of democracy, the meaning of a social organization needs to be clarified. The school curriculum has a place for all this in the K-12 ladder.

The challenge lies not in content development as a lot of such content is available, but in the pedagogy. The experiential learning environment for the understanding, appreciation and imbibing of these values has to be designed in the pedagogical practices. This calls for an intensive training of the teacher on fine tuning the life skills with each of the available concepts in all the disciplines of learning.

Any investment by the Government and the school organizations and Boards on such training is only an investment for the nurturing of the future citizens of the country.  The synergy between personal values, social values and global values needs to be addressed in a phased manner so that there is no scope for polarization of values so that there is a continual blossoming of the learners’ disposition in a school system.

Avoiding priestly approach to deliver these modules, the schools need to develop a personality lab where there is scope for experiential learning of the life skills.

It is time the system addresses to this issue with the seriousness it deserves!.