Soft Skills are an Education too

In the past couple of days, two people referred to the practice of social promotion, or age-based promotion, as a less-than-ideal practice. As a teacher I have mostly advocated for my students to be advanced to the next grade.

A commonly cited reason for holding students back is that they haven’t mastered the academic material. “How does a student reach 6^th without knowing multiplication tables?” But this would only be true if the sole reason for attending school was to master academics. While academics might be the primary reason to go to school, it is only one of many reasons that we want students to attend school.

Students, especially struggling students, need age-appropriate social interactions and models to show them how to interact with each other. Also, the classroom teaches many soft skills that we tend to discount the value of. Social interaction (interacting with different groups- peers, adults, authority figures, the opposite sex, support personnel), accepting failure and loss gracefully (sports and other contests), teamwork and project management (group projects) are just some of the life skills that students learn in school that they need for adulthood and employment.

Anybody who discounts the value of these soft skills hasn’t waited endlessly for a tailor or contractor, who has changed the due date 4 times already, to get their order finished. Or watched pavers lay a road, and telecom workers tear it up the following day. Or watched graceless celebrities pander to their petty natures and wrangle with each other in public.

In the age of the internet, knowledge is cheap, and doesn’t hold the value it once held when scribes lovingly and with great urgency copied texts by hand to preserve and disseminate information. Its very ubiquity has decreased the urgency of acquiring information. While academic knowledge is a huge necessity for the college-bound, it is of much less impact for the other section of the student body. Age-appropriate soft skills acquisition is the very thing that such struggling students need, and this can only be accomplished within a group of peers. When they demonstrate weakness in one area, then it becomes even more important to bolster their skills in the other area.

Besides, do I really want my 14 year old daughter on a school campus with 19 year old boys? We need to give students the skills they need, not what we decide they need, at the appropriate age.

After all, no tailor needs to know the name of the element with atomic weight 28. He or she does, however, need to be able to plan sufficiently well in order to estimate the pick-up date for his customer. And, curiously, the same student who never mastered his multiplication tables, can now magically figure out the cost of tailoring four blouses. 

The Invisibles

It is easier for us to respond somewhat sympathetically to people with visible disabilities- blindness, profound deafness, wheelchair-bound, intellectual disabilities, or other conditions for which a visual inspection suffices to tell us that the person has a disability. Whether or not we are truly helpful, we at least try to make certain minimum humane accommodations. We certainly don’t have the expectation that a wheelchair-bound person will walk, or a blind person will drive.

Yet we routinely have such expectations for our struggling students in school. We expect them to memorize their multiplication tables, long poems, work multi-step Math algorithms, learn non-phonetic spelling, or write five paragraph essays, when they have clearly and repeatedly tried and demonstrated that they can’t.

And then they are labeled as either lazy or stupid. Remedies vary- parents might arrange for after-school tuition, may shame the child for ‘bringing a bad name’ to the parents, may even beat him. Teachers will ignore and give up on such a student. They have enough to do, and can’t afford to spend time on a ‘lazy’ student. I met a few students who were asked to leave their school. Not only do we not help them, we heap abuse on them. A unique problem of this set of students. 

There is a fallacious assumption that the child is underperforming just to be ‘bad’ or to annoy the teacher. Teachers and parents will assign various motives to the student; yet they don’t even consider that the child may be underperforming because he clearly cannot do the work. If a student has a learning disability, it is unrealistic to expect that the child will improve with more of the same kind of teaching, yelling at him or her, blaming their parents, shaming or ignoring.

Children want to please adults. It’s very innate. Babies smile at their caregivers, toddlers read their parents’ faces to look for a smile or approval to indicate that they are doing a good job. Many new parents play a game of scowling at their infants and laughing when they cry. (For some reason, this amuses parents; I’ll never understand why…) There was an experiment conducted with toddlers crawling on all fours across the floor. When the floor changed from solid wood to clear glass, they stopped at the edge of the change and looked at their parents faces. If the mom was smiling, they continued assuredly across the floor. If the mom appeared anxious, they stopped. Such is the power of the smile on kids. From such a young age, children want to please adults, get their cues from them, and earn their approval. This trait continues through life- until it is killed by institutional cruelty and apathy. Children do want to please their teachers; but we have to earn their trust by helping them succeed. Would the babies trust their smiling parents if there was no glass floor at all, and they had fallen off the edge of the solid floor?

These chronically struggling students have an established record of underperformance and quickly acquire a reputation as lazy. Older students might have acquired negative behavior patterns as a coping strategy. They may be apathetic, defiant, passive-aggressive, depressed, off-task or distracting. They may play the part of class clown in order to attract negative attention. They embrace these negative personas as a mask to cover up their academic failures. These behaviors are not the cause of their academic problems, but rather the result of continued failure on the part of the teaching establishment to address their needs effectively.

Blind or deaf students, students on the autism spectrum, or with cerebral palsy, etc, have schools that cater to their specific needs. While I don’t necessarily agree with the concept of a segregated education, at least it is acknowledged that a different kind of system needs to be used to educate students with different needs. Students with learning disabilities, on the other hand, don’t fit into any of these schools, nor can they succeed in their regular classes. They are truly invisible, the most under-served section of our students. I feel for them.

Ignoring this section of the school population does have a negative impact on us as a society- it comes back to bite us. These are the students who have sufficient general intelligence to blend into society as adults, yet will have acquired no useful or marketable skills in school. Hence they are underemployed, bitter, and at loose ends. They might be the ones spraying graffiti, getting involved in petty crime, becoming con men, sitting on compound walls, idling with similar friends, winking and whistling at our daughters in the evening hours, and generally being a menace.

It is in our interest as a society to educate every student in our classrooms, not just the smart ones. The smart students can, and will succeed, with or without teachers. They are motivated, and have no processing disorders to hold them back. It is the struggling student who truly needs our help, empathy, skills and time. In him or her lies our true test of teaching, and our humanity.

And, yes, learning disability is a real disability.