Habits like time management, creative thinking, and self-discipline are commonly celebrated as key to success. We learn it's important to be accountable, and to communicate effectively. And everyone knows how crucial it is to be persistent, and to manage money properly.
There are several reasons why life skills aren't taught in school. Lack of funding. Many schools struggle to get enough money to teach what's already on the curriculum. Lack of time.
Proper communication skills, empathy, seeing things from other people's perspectives and teaching respect will make a massive difference in the way kids talk to each other and think about their own actions.
Schools don't usually teach how to manage one's finances and the intricacies related to all these topics. However, finances are incredibly important. We need to know what to do and what to avoid, how to stay afloat, how to save money and how to invest it.
Why isn't personal finance taught in school and why don't all students have access to personal finance coaches before they take out student loans? The answer is a mix of inertia in the system and a failure to recognize financial literacy as one of the core skills needed to succeed in the 21st century.
Schools often focus more on hard, measurable skills. Soft skills are difficult to measure, grade, and give certifications to prove exceptionalism. Certainly, you practice soft skills at school, but to be truly successful you need to hone them like you do hard skills.
Schools teach many useless things because they teach on a just-in-case basis. You learn a bit of everything just in case it becomes useful. But modern life is much more based on a different system: JIT (just in time).
Ability to listen, learn from others and respectfully interact with people you disagree with. The capacity to listen, understand, and communicate with people, even if you disagree with them, is a crucial life skill that many people overlook.
What is taught is not what is learnt because learning requires the active, constructive involvement of the learner. So, if the teacher teaches some concept then it is not necessary that students learnt it as students possess different· abilities, personalities and come from a variety of backgrounds.
Soft skills are intangible and usually unteachable, meaning you can't sign up for a class to acquire them. Common examples include: Critical Thinking. Leadership.
Schools focus on academic knowledge and teach students to memorize information, and gives them extremely low chances to learn critical life skills. Schools focus on preparing them for universities, but not for jobs and real life. It doesn't teach them how to manage money, how to negotiate, how to communicate.
Schools teach knowledge, but life requires wisdom
Instead of learning critical life skills on how to manage money, how to negotiate, or how to communicate, kids are mostly taught to memorize information. This is helpful to learn, but not at the cost of not learning critical life skills.
Educators and parents avoid teaching emotional intelligence because they think children are too young or too immature to handle the content. However, childhood development experts say this is the best time to broach difficult subjects.
And while school can make you more academically intelligent-- it can teach you physics, algebra, calculus-- it is diminishing the children's creative intelligence. It is teaching them to think a certain way, to go down a certain path in life.
Some of the skills hiring managers find lacking or absent are unexpected. Critical thinking, problem solving, attention to detail, and writing proficiency top the list of skills managers find missing from job seekers' personal tool kits.
Money is a touchy subject for many. Money brings up feelings of deep emotions, anxiety, shame, guilt, embarrassment, and much more when having to talk about income, expenses, and spending patterns. Money is also seen as a measure of status and power.
The research shows that schools have been experiencing a funding crisis for some time. It highlights the importance of ensuring that school budgets are protected in real terms in order that core budgets are not slashed.
As stated earlier, financial decisions students begin to make right out of high school can and will affect them from graduation to retirement and beyond. Teaching students' financial skills while they are still in school with a quality curriculum that successfully develops these skills is essential.
44% of teachers leave within the first five years in the profession. (That's well over a third of new teachers.) In general, newer teachers are 2 ½ times more likely to quit than those who are tenured. Regardless, an astounding 8% of teachers start over with a new career each year.