Skills Mania: Snake Oil in Our Schools?

Push for skills doesn't even come through with the jobs it promises, while edging out liberal arts studies and citizenship development

By: Bob Davis

  As education debates march forward and back these days, a connecting link between many of them is often ignored. Take the debate about whether student ignorance of Canadian history is a scandal which should be turned around. I am thinking of publicists like Jack Granatstein and the new Dominion Institute/Historica lobby supported financially be Edgar Bronfman Jr. and other members of the Canadian establishment - even if like Bronfman they may be living in the United States. These vocal critics tell us that in the early 1970s all the abused classes of Canada, through the subject of social science, wrestled history teaching away from the rest of us and buried the real Canadian history about Vimy Ridge and Normandy.
  What is missing in this announcement? They never tell us that from the 1970s educators and organizations like the Conference Board of Canada have been saying that the new global computer age requires a different education which must downplay the old content emphasis in English, History and Geography and up-play teaching the skills of analysis (critical thinking skills) in these fields - i.e. teaching students how to do history, not to cover masses of history content.
  Then think of the debate about the new provincial testing in Ontario, so confidently recommended these days in a provincial government television commercial. What do such standardized provincial tests actually test - a question usually ignored? The organization responsible in Ontario for creating and administering the tests, the Education Quality and Accountability Office, is very proud that they do not test facts but skills of various kinds. Does this society know the implications of this emphasis and want it for our children? The issue is rarely discussed.
 

The push for skills is the latest evolution of an conservative education lobby that begain in the 70s and 80s with groups like the Quality Education Network and the Organization for Quality Education, which represented the first generation whose children were doing more poorly than their parents

Education for the Information Age
  This issue of what I call "skills mania" has intrigued me for some time. We are obsessed with skills of all kinds - reading skills, reading-readiness skills, parenting skills, love-making skills, media skills, political skills and, yes, even life skills - which in school means how to fill in application forms and dress properly for interviews.
  Everyone has heard the Information Age's educational pitch: content is obsolete today because it goes out-of-date so fast and because students forget it so fast. It's also mostly propaganda, many skills experts say. We therefore must emphasize not what to learn but how to learn. We must start off with basic skills - numbers and words - teaching reading, writing and mathematics well as a foundation for everything else. I agree completely. What I do battle with is the next stage, the plan for late elementary and high school: the move to something called generic skills, especially portable and critical thinking skills. These concepts mean abilities like creative problem solving, weighing evidence, probing possible explanations, understanding classification systems, knowing the complexities of teamwork, etc.
  Armed with these transferable thinking skills, the theory continues, student graduates will probably have to change jobs ten or twelve times in a lifetime, but each new job will be as interesting as the last. Meanwhile we will have armed them further with non-vocational thinking skills like media literacy (the word "literacy" has come to mean knowing the skills in a certain field) and political literacy, in place of the dead old subject of citizenship training. For their non-work hours we will also have passed on social skills, coping skills and life skills.
  The need for this educational revolution is said to be the arrival of the new information oriented global capitalism with its vast new computer and robotic systems, its shrinkage of industrial jobs and its increase of high-tech and service jobs.

Skills Philosophy melded with New Conservatism
  One phenomenon which baffled me at first is the very conservative tone of much current education thinking, a tone which seems to contradict the up-beat preparation for change, change, change of the new skills philosophy. The old groups like the Quality Education Network and the Organization for Quality Education represented in the late 1970s and 1980s the first generation whose children were doing more poorly than their parents. These parents blamed public schools for the difficulties of their kids, but they could not afford private schools. They demanded a return to tough discipline and hard testing. The original redneck tone of much of their publicity was cleverly managed to incorporate the skills philosophy.

Skills Mania: Snake Oil in Our Schools?
  Am I slipping into conspiracy theory? Not at all. Mark Holmes and I are trying to get the quality groups to add the disadvantaged to their concerns, Dennis Raphael told me in the early 1990s. These men were both University of Toronto professors - one in education and one in social work - and they helped to do the stickhandling for Ontario which for Canada as a whole was led by Dr. Joe Freedman of Alberta.
  This information age/conservative philosophy is the conventional wisdom in all education departments across Canada. It's actually more like a dogma because it doesn't even come through with the jobs it's cracked up to provide, as D. W. Livingstone shows in The Education -Jobs Gap: Underemployment or Economic Democracy. And what concerns me even more is that the humane and citizenly roles for a liberal arts education are being edged out of the curriculum. That's why I wrote my recent book, Skills Mania : Snake Oil in Our Schools?

Bob Davis taught high school for over thirty years and currently teaches at York University. His new book, Skills Mania: Snake Oil in Our Schools? is published by Between the Lines www.btlbooks.com.

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