Should We Teach Skills in School

Calm down! Hold your horses! No need to run off to rainbow island just yet. I know, it's controversial. I mean, that's half the fun. I'm not trying to change your opinion, but maybe by the end of reading this you understand the argument better—an argument as old as the modern ages.

Before we get into this, let's see what exactly is Skill.

Skill is an ability. A thing you can do. For the purposes of this article, whenever we refer to skill, think Android, think MATLAB.

Now that we have established what Skill is, I'll tell you the alternative to teaching a Skill to help my argument. The alternative here is to teach what the skill enlists as its pre-requisites.

Think of it as learning how to use something vs learning how it works. You learn how it works, you automatically know how to use it. Because of all those times you spent learning. You learn how something works, you can implement it to a decent extent later on.

Now back to the question—should we teach skills in school? That might just be the wrong approach to teaching, especially when experiential teaching is the new fad. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against teaching skills. I would learn how to use an Arduino. But if I'm taught how to use an Arduino, I only learn how to use an Arduino.

I talked about alternatives, how would one exactly go about doing that? In the example I took, of an Arduino, wouldn't it be much better if I was taught C which is what the Arduino works upon? Teaching the language isn't only easier but also opens up students to new avenues. That's how the world works now. We don't want people to think, we want them to think out of the box, to do something different like no one ever has.

Let's face it, the world we live in is rapidly evolving, it is fast and the kids are faster. Teaching Skills is linear in a lot of ways. And in this new age, linearity is not what we want. We want dynamic thinkers to set new standards and benchmarks.

In this fast paced tech era a skill might not live to see the next 5 years, it might go redundant, but your knowledge about the backend of it won't. Because ultimately that's what's at play—the strong backend being implemented in a different way.