Life Skills Education or What Might We Need To Be Good At Life

We measure societal progress on by capita income and growth. In recent years there has been a great debate stating that economic advancement should not be the only measure. Aspects like well-being of the nation and even human rights framework achievement should be counted towards progress metrics too.

I personally love the idea of not equating progress to money. What we need to do is to pay attention to more humane metrics. To more humane aspects of what we as a society invest in.

Something that resonates with me a lot is power of education. We spend most of our lives learning. We are taught by our parents, by our teachers, lecturers, bosses. Things that get prioritised in learning are usually heavily academical and relate strongly to our “survival”: how to walk, eat, talk, read, be good at subjects, be good at your job.

If we think about everyday activities that make us truly fulfilled and happy, they are usually not centred around math problems. This is not to say that math is unimportant, but that we might be putting too much value in passing math tests than other things.

What approaches do we have to learn how to be proud of our own and others’ achievements? How to be truly creative? How to be empathetic? How to be compassionate? How to accept people’s sexual choices? How to accept yours? How to be happy with your body? What about job enjoyment and contribution? What about how to deal with difficult situations like domestic abuse?

Introducing universal educational standard on life skills could be a great first step to a more wholesome, more progressive society.

Empathy, communication, decision making, conflict resolution, knowing how to ask for help, compassion, gratitude, environmental responsibility, creative thinking— all these skills are critical for leading a more meaningful life that further not only individual progress but create opportunities for a societal shift to contribution driven values.

What we do not want is ever-shifting responsibility between what parents vs school should teach a child. Responsibility is shared, and not acknowledging vast differences in upbringing leads to unequal opportunities to learn.

Why do we need this?

We can identify numerous areas where we as a global society need improvement. Environmental issues, poverty, global health, an incredible economical divide, immigration, war zones, child and domestic abuse, human trafficking. To combat these issues, we need a greater proportion of people that care.

We need a greater proportion of people who were raised not only on literacy and numeracy tests but on encouragement and thinking about the world.

We won’t solve world crises by just changing educational approach alone but creating a more “wholesome” society could be a step towards that.

I am not minimising the task that is changing our educational systems, but no important challenge is an easy one.

The good news is we have plenty of examples to learn from and research to support this.

• The Greater Good Science Centre in Berkeley is a leader in this space. They have created an entire community that promotes ‘happiness’ education: research driven and practical examples of how to appropriately incorporate emotional well-being and growth focused approaches into schools and the broader community.
• The Harvard Graduate School of Education and multiple other research facilities have shown that teaching positive life-skills to young people at any level not only correlates to their overall better mental state and well-being but even improves their grades.

What can we do now?

Selecting and more importantly, being leaders of change. In my country, New Zealand, we are far from the idyllic curriculum described on The Ministry of Education’s website. Nevertheless, we are making some progress:

• Attitude is an awesome community involved in giving talks on resilience and direction at schools
• We have organisations like RainbowYouth that attend schools to promote mental well-being of LGBTI youth
• The Shadow a Leader programme gives opportunities to students to learn and connect with people from outside of their environment
• Motivational festivals like Festival for the Future that bring together many young minds together to inspire them
• Life Skill Programme that introduces an 18 week course on mental health and behavioural skills
• Great online resources like this one for parents to actively participate in their children’s mental health and well-being

We are investing into degrees, cancer treatments, and better roads. What we should be also investing in more is happier more equipped people.

I hope this encouraged you to go out in the world and advocate for better leadership and human-ship in your life and the lives of others. I encourage you to go and read / watch at least one thing I linked in this article on life skills or well-being education, and learn a bit more on how you can be the change we all need. This one is my favourite.