Hard Truths on Soft Skills

“Soft skills” are all the rage now in education. It’s now become conventional wisdom. Everybody knows they are important—and more important to education than whatever technical expertise we convey, even in a technical college. We know this, ultimately, as educators, because employers tell us so. They say “soft skills” are more important to the success of their business, and to an employee getting ahead, than any specific knowledge or skills we can give them.

Just one problem—with this new emphasis on “soft skills,” we are reinventing the wheel. And, this time, getting it wrong.

You’d think we, as educators, could learn.

What, exactly, are “soft skills,” you may ask? It’s admittedly a bit difficult to get a fix on it. A seminar I just attended cited “the human dimension,” “caring,” and “learning how to learn.” Wikipedia gives a different list: “participates as a member of the team; teaches others; serves client/customers; exercises leadership; negotiates; works with cultural diversity; motivates others.” The next Google hit is an article that lists the top five “soft skills” desired by business as “math, safety, courtesy, honesty, grammar.”

Nothing “soft” here, really. In sum, what we are apparently talking about is neither more nor less than what is commonly referred to as a “classical education” –and as that term is understood, not just in North America, but in all cultures. Grammar and math? That’s obvious: the good old “three Rs” of what used to be called “grammar school.” But teaching virtue was also always at the core of any education system, up to the modern era. The churches, or the temples or the mosques, ran the schools. If they weren’t considered schools themselves, as they are in Judaism.

As for “the human dimension” or “caring”—we cannot, of course, teach people to have specific emotions, and to do so if we could would be a violation of human dignity; though to the extent we can, religion is the way. But what really can be taught, in this regard, and all that really needs be taught, is good manners. That used to be a vital part of the educational experience, too. A good private education was meant to teach one to be a “gentleman.” To give you a proper “finish.” Confucian education spent about one fifth of the curriculum on the matter of right ritual.

Surprise—it matters. If you don’t think so, you have never dealt with a store clerk.
“Learning to learn”? Check. That was the point of courses in philosophy, algebra, geometry, and formal logic—originally the main focus of “middle school.”

Working together, and leadership? That’s what high school used to be about. That’s why we all used to study rhetoric—learning how to motivate people, learning how to dispute honourably and fairly, and learning the proper rules of parliamentary procedure, which are simply the time-tested rules for getting along in groups.

We used to study all this, until we dumped it at some point for more “relevance,” and more “science.”

Unfortunately, the new push for “soft skills” seems to be totally unaware still of the past ten thousand years of human thinking and experience. Its gurus seem to have no fix on what is actually required. They think, for example, it all has something to do with “EQ” or “Emotional Intelligence”—a self-contradictory concept, which, if pursued energetically, seems to have as its goal the production of a perfect psychopath, skilled in manipulating the emotions of others without compunction for their own gain. When they seek to tackle “values,” they seem to think this involves simply getting along in groups. Unfortunately, this premise would necessarily condemn both Jesus Christ and the Jews of Nazi Germany as immoral.

Nor is such an ethic likely to produce anything like an ability to think for oneself, let alone leadership.

An additional, serious problem is that our teachers themselves have no special training in any real “soft skills.” How can they teach what they do not themselves know? How are they any more likely to get it right than their average student?

It’s all a nightmare. And a nightmare of the “education profession’s” own making.

Of course, as a Canadian, I am familiar with a standard response to any lament about our schools. The Canadian education system ranks, on objective testing, as one of the best in the world. How can we complain? We’re doing better than everyone else…

Not quite everyone, of course. Overall, we come third, after Finland and Hong Kong. We are doing better than the US and the UK—that’s what we Canadians tend to notice.

The whole world has been moving away from the classical model for generations; there is no straight comparison available in these figures. However, it is worth noting that _most_ of the countries that cluster near the top of the scale are East Asian, where the classical tradition is still strongest. And we _can_ do a straight comparison, if we want: between North American public schools and North American private schools following a classical curriculum. On standard tests the latter’s students win almost every time.

What is to be done? The obvious first step is to change our teacher training. We need to educate teachers, first, in the classical skills and the classical readings; or employ as teachers those who already have this grounding. They will then be able to help the next generation. This is just what we should cover in teachers’ colleges.