Going ''soft'' on children's education

Following the announcement by a teachers' union that some subjects should be scrapped to focus on the "soft skills" valued by employers, Judith Gillespie wrote an article for the "Evening Times".

Imagine the scene: you suddenly discover that no water is coming out of your taps. You establish that the Water Board hasn’t turned the water off in the street and then phone for a plumber. A charming young man turns up. He smiles and chats in a friendly way, wipes his feet carefully, puts paper down to protect your carpets, lays out all his tools in a tidy fashion and then hasn’t a clue what to do. The reason? He has been taught loads of “soft skills”, like good communication and working with others, but has absolutely no knowledge about domestic water systems and depends on the Internet for finding out his facts.

Whilst that scenario may already strike a chord for some, it is likely to become totally routine if a teachers’ union in England (yes, you read that right – a teachers’ union) has its way. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) are calling for a scrapping of subject-teaching in favour of cross-curricular inquiries that focus on and develop the skills needed for the work place. They argue that it is not for schools to teach knowledge, as this can be found on the Internet; instead schools should focus on the soft skills that employers repeatedly say they need – hence my charming and totally ignorant plumber.

Of course this is also a spin doctor’s dream. How wonderful to have a population so utterly devoid of knowledge that you can spin any story that helps support your case – Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction come to mind along with any conspiracy theory you like to think of.

Then of course there is the small problem that whilst there are certainly a lot of facts on the Internet, there are also a lot of things that are not true. How is my charming but ignorant plumber to decide between Creationism, which believes the world is only 6,000 years old and was created in six days, and the Big Bang theory and evolution?

There is an old saying that knowledge is power and certainly the converse – lack of knowledge leaves people devoid of power. In the days before we “knew” that the World is round and goes round the Sun, people were frightened, awe-struck and mystified by a total eclipse. It was a golden opportunity for any contemporary guru to provide an explanation that left him in a very powerful position.

The debate between knowledge and skills is well established and the call from the ATL has echoes in Scotland with the Executive’s new Curriculum for Excellence. Here too there are proposals that teaching should be through “cross-curricular experiences”, with more focus on skills, particularly “soft” skills that supposedly prepare people for work. However, the Executive has not banished knowledge to cyber space. Indeed, the Minister, Peter Peacock, has spent a lot of time reassuring History teachers that their subject is safe in his hands.

Good learning and teaching require a balance of knowledge and skills; neither one, on its own, is much good. Having an encyclopaedic knowledge of facts is not much use unless you want to appear on Master Mind! We need skills to release the full potential of the facts. We have to link, analyse and apply them to make them useful. However, if you don’t have the facts to start with, you have nothing to work with.

Then there is a wee problem about being totally dependent on the Internet – will it always be available? I appreciate that for the next generation, technology will be a constant and, if not always plugged into their ears, at least not further away than a finger tip. However, will people always have time to search – even with the help of Google?

The most useful knowledge is the knowledge we carry in our heads. A lot of that is so long established and instinctive we don’t even think of it as acquired knowledge. However, think what a baby knows and work out how far you’ve come. Babies look at the world around them and have no framework by which to work out what is usual and what is exceptional; they can be fascinated by the mundane and assume that the extraordinary is no more than common place. In contrast, babies have soft skills wired into their systems – they can charm and delight, communicate and generally get everyone dancing attendance. So, if school pupils emerge from babies, why do teachers think they need to work so hard on teaching soft skills at the expense of knowledge?

The real irony of all this is that the very existence of the Internet depended on scientists who, over the centuries, worked with facts and knowledge, not smiles and people skills. Where would we be today without their knowledge? Still frightened by an eclipse of the sun probably!

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