Trishna
Barman
Education involved three basic stages,
which include ‘Sravana’ (acquiring knowledge through listening), ‘Manana’ (to
internalize through thinking, analysis and assimilation) and ‘Nidhyasana’
(comprehending and applying knowledge in real life). The schools and
institutions in India today have become more and more academic and career based
resulting in dichotomy between the text and the context. India’s education has
become institutionalized on acquisition of information, knowledge and technical
skills, leaving behind the importance of preparing students to learn the life
skills which will empower to live effectively in the world. The scores in
examinations are considered as a yardstick of good education and the talents
and potentials are not measured.
Character building, citizenship development, competency development to
face the challenges of day to day life is not taking place. Education is important but education to
support and live life better is more important.
These
days almost all educators agree that students need more than just academic
knowledge in order to be successful in life. Life outside, is nothing like the
classroom environment and requires different ways to succeed. In a constantly
changing environment, having the survival skills is an essential part of being
able to meet the challenges of everyday life. To cope with the increasing pace
and the change of modern life, life skills act as a key to future success. Life
skills are essentially those abilities that help a student to know oneself,
describe one’s feeling, give and receive feedback, think out of the box, set
realistic and attainable goals, to think differently and employs problem
solving strategies.
Some ways in which acquiring life skill help in
minimising stress:
Ø VALUES CLARIFICATION
Many versions of
stressful life events are found to be of value laden nature and require
clarity, in order to sort them through. Yet, the finalising process may be
quite difficult due to pre-impose values placed upon persons by society,
family, religion, etc. Those imposed values may not be in accordance to values
of those making the decision. Hence, there is a need to strengthen the ethnic
clarification skills by creating an atmosphere where opinions and beliefs on
values laden issues can be assessed which will shape future actions.
Ø DECISION MAKING
It
is a decisive life skill, which requires to be developed from a formative age.
Since decision making in many stressed filled situations can be a difficult
task due to heightened emotion, superfluous influences etc, it is therefore
important that an individual has a constant experience with decision making
related factors, increasing their level of intuitiveness. Life skill can equip
one to come up with the correct decision to enrich their lives.
Ø COMMUNICATION SKILLS
Effective
communication is a critical component in dealing with potentially stressful
situations. Numerous life events are interpersonal in nature and if effective
communications are not honed, expression of personal feelings cannot take
place, creating a space for negativity to breed. Bottling up of emotions cultivates
a potentially stressful environment –making way for life skills to play its
part. Life skill activities promoting the art of communication in the classroom
or group setting can greatly enhance a sharing a sharing atmosphere.
Training
on life skills has become extremely essential with the growing competitive
environment and peer pressure. Life skills are not only wanted by the young but
all. We all get to use them at several regular intervals and critical junctures
in our daily lives. Life skills are the building blocks of one’s behaviour and
are used at every moment of life in various situations.
The world bodies, such
as UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO listed ten core life skills, are as follows:
1. Self-awareness
2. Critical
thinking
3. Creative
thinking
4. Decision
making
5. Problem
solving
6. Effective
communication
7. Interpersonal
relationship
8. Empathy
9. Coping
with stress
10.
Coping with emotion
When
we talk about imparting life skills education in classroom, activities such as
classroom discussion, brainstorming, role plays, educational games and simulations,
storytelling, debates enhance life skills in students. On the whole, life skill
education has found to be an effective psychosocial intervention strategy for
promoting positive social and mental health of adolescents which plays an
important role in all aspects such as strengthening coping strategies and
developing self confidence and emotional intelligence, as well as enhancing
critical thinking, problem solving and decision making skills. Thus, there is
significance and importance of life skill education to be integrated into the
regular curriculum to enhance the mental health of students, equip them with
better adapted skills to face the challenges of changing life situation and
empower them to become fully functioning contributors to host the society in
particular and the world in general.
While conflict of inner self with outer perception
is inevitable, confrontation with stressful situations need to be encouraged
rather than avoided. Hence, focussing on the importance of life skills, The
Director of Technical Education played a key role in developing life skills of
the students by making life skill education as a part of the curriculum as
there is a decrease of moral values, high insecurity and negative thoughts among
our upcoming generation.
Trishna Barman was Guest Lecturer, Humanities Department, AEI
(Picture from internet)