to think children should be taught social skills, public speaking and conflict resolution at school?

[CailinDana]

And that those skills and the confidence they give are just as important as academic skills, if not more so in some ways?

I haven't read the whole thread but completely agree. I went to a rubbish state school that severely knocked my confidence. I went from being the lead role in the school play at primary to being terrified of speaking in public. I was scared of being bullied, of standing out, of being good at anything and wanted to be invisible.

I went to uni and had to get a note from the doctor to get me out of presenting because of panic attacks. I noticed that all the privately educated students had so much more confidence in themselves. I think it's due mainly to the culture within schools, encouraging excellence and instilling confidence. I also think it's down to the other pupils, If you go to a school where being cool is being thick then it's never going to be easy.

I have avoid presenting for 8 years since leaving uni, and it's ruining my career chances. My issues have nothing to do with my parents and everything to do with my school. My parents were always very supportive.

I agree, with the exception of public speaking, and conflict resolution that children should be taught these social skills.
However, this is the job of a parent and too many these days expect the school to have all the responsibility of socialising their children.
What is wrong with parents teaching their children social skills, just like every generation before and schools being allowed to teach the academic subjects?
No wonder children leave school unable to read and write.

That's fair enough Claudius, you are happy with your skills and it doesn't cause you any hassle. But I think for a lot of people a lack of these skills is a problem, and that's why I think schools should address it.

Wilson, funnily enough despite years of drama classes I wouldn't class myself as an extrovert. I think I'm middling if anything, leaning toward introvert. I don't like socialising in big groups, I prefer one to one or maximum 3-4 people, and I never really wanted to go into acting as a job despite a lot of encouragement to do so. But the skills I gained from drama have stood me in such good stead. I was severely depressed at the age of 7. You can imagine what sort of life I might have been heading for. I honestly think the abilities I gained through drama, to handle social situations and present myself to the world, saved me in many ways. I suppose that's part of the reason I feel so strongly about it.

We can teach social skills and conflict resolution as much as we like but when children are going home and their parents are fighting in the street with the neighbours or fighting and swearing in the school yard this I'm afraid is where they get their social cues from. We can model good behaviour and explain how things are done but this has been their reference point since they were born and its an uphill struggle to fight against this.

Tell gove that. He just scrapped the oral presentation element of the English language GCSE (half way through this years year 11 cohort-can you imagine the outcry if a private education/training establishment suddenly changed the course half way through so that a large percentage of the hard work you did was suddenly worthless!?!!!)

According to him, public speaking isn't important. A good memory and passing examinations is.

Bullie isn't it worth the school actively countering that with explicit teaching?

You only have to look at the relationships board to see how much we, as a society, need early, clear and specific teaching in the the area of relationships. Even on a personal level I know so many people who are in deeply unhealthy and unsatisfying intimate relationships.

I appreciate that ideally parents would model these values naturally but when so many children are witnessing poor examples of basic people skills where does it leave them? I guess this is where outfits like Surestart are supposed to plug the gaps.

Yes but in that case explicitly teaching can seem like preaching to a working class kid. I think its fairly well documented that working class children are quite bright in that respect, they see through it. What happens is that many perceive the message to be counter cultural to their background.

Mini I agree with you that the school environment is 'frightfully middle class' but surely that isn't an insurmountable issue. Not forgetting it's not just WC/'UC' families that aren't modelling positive behaviours to their children.

It's crucial in the professional job workplace to articulate yourselves well. To learn how to speak with confidence and credibility, to communicate verbally -
how one arrives to their conclusion, describe their data and its meaning, to present research methods etc etc..This can be in many forms in a 1:1 to 1:many setting.

Today, my department delivered a 1day product immersion program for new engineers and the individual session presenters used all kinds of multi-media for delivering presentation including:

video, animation, live video conferencing & powerpoint.

Not only were these young engineers and interns (as young as 17) were able to stand up on stage infront of Fortune 100 CxO level execs to present live but they were also being filmed, flawlessly delivering their presentation to a global audience.

The young men and women engineers Q&A handling at the end of their presentation was astounding.

No way could I have done that or had the balls to when I was 18. For those who HAVE the confidence and 'arrived' in terms of their presenting and social skills,the bar has been set very high indeed.

I saw a poster mention about technology being a hindrance to social skills. That's definitely not the case i.e. Silicon Valley billion dollar entrepreneurs not yet in their 30s!!

One has to wonder how they got to be like that and where their confidence comes from, considering these are pretty nerdy computer engineers and who I assume spend all their time in front of computers.

The kids at my son's school, in the centre of a deprived estate, have all achieved massively in the new style of learning where they own their education, it's something they participate in rather than is done to them. Learning to verbally present their work to both children and adults is part of that. There's no "preaching", you can't see through something that's not fake.

cookie I don't know if swaying was answering your question, but if she didn't mean to she did! They own their stuff, they absolutely know it inside out - and that comes across.

OP I absolutely agree with you on that last post - drama saved my life tbh. But a big part of that was about finding my 'tribe', it wouldn't have had such an impact on me if it had been within the school environment because I would have been scared to put myself forward tbh.

I think kids should be taught about personal finance...luckily, from next September, they are going to be .

HERE is an article about it

Sorry, a bit off topic.

wilson & swaying Yes, that makes sense. Knowing your subject matter, being passionate about it is probably the key.

headinhands, I think your right about the fact that so many people have poor relationships, they suffer and their children do to, and it isn't just the traditional WC or what we think of as the Underclass. But then I think there are so many people who think they are MC when they are actually WC. Sell your labour then...and all that.

I also think this idea that schools should teach social skills stems from changes to the economic base in society with so many women having to do the double shift, children need to be with parents a significant amount of time in order to learn these social cues. In previous generations, one carer from 0-5 and that child witnessed most social situations btw the parent and others. There was no quick 5 minute dash round tesco at 8pm, it was a whole morning trudging around various shops. Added to that, there was community, and the child witnessed the interactions btw lots of adults.

Calin, I explained in my post we do tackle it every time it crops up, we use assemblies, lessons, small group sessions, school visitors etc. Some children we can get through to but others have such a hard shell from a young age I fear we will never make the breakthrough. But we never ever give up.