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Gender and Education for All
THE LEAP TO EQUALITY |
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The term ‘life skills’ is currently used by many governments, organizations and individual authors. It has become an important element in the discourse on learning and development. In various empirical applications of the term, a certain dissatisfaction with regular education as being too theoretical is evident, as well as a wish to make education and learning programs more relevant to the lives of children and adults. Education and learning programs are thought by some people to have focused too strongly on the cognitive elements (‘learning to know’ as the Delors Commission put it . UNESCO, 1996). Other dimensions of learning are said to deserve more attention, such as learning to apply knowledge and skills; learning to co-operate with other groups; and learning to develop oneself as an autonomous person. The Delors Commission and the DeSeCo project (Rychen and Salganik, 2001; OECD, 2002a) each articulated this broader notion of learning, even if their terminology and conclusions are not quite identical.
While this critique of educational practice may be widely acknowledged, there is little agreement on what life skills means. Indeed, it has no central place in the work of either the Delors Commission or the DeSeCo project.
The term appears to be used in one of the following five ways, sometimes combining some of the categories.
- The term ‘life skills’ is often used to capture skills such as problem-solving, working in teams, networking, communicating, negotiating, etc. Their generic nature - their importance throughout life, in varying contexts - is held in common with literacy skills. Sometimes these generic skills are therefore referred to as the ‘fourth box’, in addition to the three main components of literacy: reading, writing and numeracy. These generic skills are seldom, if ever, acquired in isolation from other skills.
-The term life skills is also often used to refer to skills needed in daily life that are strongly connected to a certain context. Examples are livelihood skills, health skills, skills related to gender and family life, and environmental skills. These can be termed ‘contextual skills’, while accepting that skills are in practice never purely
| | contextual or purely generic. Moreover, these contextual skills seldom exist in isolation from certain generic and literacy skills. Thus, to sustain a livelihood may not only require practical skills such as the ability to grow crops or to repair equipment, but also a generic skill such as negotiation, and a literacy skill such as numeracy. It is also in the acquisition of these contextual skills that the links with other types of skill are important (Oxenham et al., 2002; Oxenham, 2003), not least when women are the target group (Robinson-Pant, 2003).
- Because of these links, some see the contextual skills as composite skills that include generic and literacy skills. This is expressed in the use of terms such as legal literacy, family literacy, health literacy, money literacy, environmental literacy, visual literacy and, tautological as it may seem, word literacy (Hanemann, 2003). However, this notion of multiple literacies tends to undervalue the ‘common denominator of skills involved in reading and writing, and the fact that these skills will be of special importance because it is their applicability to a wider variety of situations that makes them basic (Lauglo, 2001). For reasons of measurement and monitoring it seems important to distinguish generic and literacy skills from contextual skills, notwithstanding the benefits of linking the three in the praxis of skills acquisition.
- The term life skills is also used in the school context. Here, the term is used to refer to any subject matter other than language or mathematics, e.g. science and technology, civic sense, community development, health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS and related behavior.
-Finally, one finds other miscellaneous skills being referred to as life skills, such as cooking, making friends and crossing the street.
It can be concluded that generic and ‘contextual’ skills are the more important and robust subsets of skills among those that are usually referred to as life skills. There is merit in distinguishing these from one another and from literacy skills, while acknowledging the links between the three in practice.
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Source: ‘Understanding Goal 3’. Analysis by the EFA Global Monitoring Report Team (to be posted on the Report’s website).
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