‘Education systems can help people lead happier, more fulfilling lives by teaching them to be aware of their thoughts,  emotions and behaviors’ say Sir Anthony Seldon.

This quote I came across when researching educating students for  life. 

Many countries education do extremely well with academic learning, standardized tests and exams especially throughout Asia with curriculum very traditional based purely on academic learning. However when it comes to life skills learnt they are miffed about the importance….

My question is can they go out and be part of the real world. What if they have a terrible experience in their first job  with minimal skills in resilience, coping mechanisms, will it put them off for life? Or if they are a brilliant Doctor, however have no bed side manner as that wasn’t an important skill they were taught. 

There is more emphasis on the academic side than the learning process.  What does this mean, they ask, students can deceiver information learnt from books, journals, the Internet and many other places. 

Blooms taxonomy cognitive domain (knowledge based) academic learners generally are very good at the first 1-4 levels remembering, understanding, applying and analyzing. Then if you look at evaluating and creating this becomes extremely difficult. As this part of the brain hasn’t been trained or even developed due to the focus on academic learning and not life lesson.

Let’s look at a chess  game as an analogy  there many strategic moves we can learn academically to win however it is interpreting the moves of the next player. Which is important reading the player, learning the patterning or even playing on the attack in order to be strategic or solve the problems.Good players think of more than 3 moves ahead.

A lot of school talk about being teaching in their curriculum is to learn to be a ‘student of the world or life long learner’ which involves being a academic and Intellectual learning. See the chart below Academic learning focuses on Memorising, Practicing, counting and reciting where as Intellectual learning is reasoning, predicting, hypothesising and problem solving.

Academic learning is important however we must look at teaching students happiness as mentioned in the quote by Sir Anthony Seldon “Education systems can help people lead happier, more fulfilling lives by teaching them to be aware of their thoughts,  emotions and behaviors”

Teach life outside of books and classrooms #teachlife.