Life Skills

Rabbi Horowitz's next Mishpacha column is up on his website here. He looks at the necessity of teaching "life skills" to our children and how it falls under the umbrella of the obligation to teach one's son a vocation.

Quite frankly, the fact that we need to even have a discussion about acquiring basic life skills is astounding and borders on insane. The world is such that your average person must utilize basic math, composition, and oratory skills on a regular basis. To allow children to graduate high school without these skills is nearly criminal.

In my two former workplaces, management administered a written exam before they would even conduct an interview for hiring. I do not believe that this is common procedure in most offices or most professions, but I think it is a fine idea and if I were to ever open my own firm and hire my own employees., I would conduct a written exam. As the employee who was more often than not assigned to take new auditors out into the field to teach basic audit technique and work paper composition, I have found that employees lacking communication skills are like dead weight. Imagine what it would be like working with those who didn't even get through the interview process!

Unfortunately, many of our children are lacking basic life skills. I had the opportunity to teach in a Girls High School and had students who could not produce an organized, concise, grammatically correct short paragraph or even sentence. Forget spelling! One would think that they had unintentionally entered a conversation on Instant Messenger if they saw the work that was submitted to me. (Girls, the word before is not spelled b4, too/to is not 2, and for is not 4!). I had other high school students who did not know the order of operations or who could not add fractions with different denominators, much less apply their skills to a basic word problem (heck, they were not even being assiged word problems). I'm not sure that these girls will be able to project a household budget, although some of them are now engaged/married and will be expected to support or partially support their household. And when I pulled out my red pen, they cried bloody murder all the way to the administrator's office, where I got slapped on the wrist for hurting their self-esteem.

I believe that what we include in a yeshiva or day school curriculum should be deliberate. I do not believe that we need to teach every subject that is taught in other schools. But we cannot afford to ignore basic skills that are necessary for everyday living.

Many will argue that the lengthy school day and the demands of a proper kodesh curriculum do not allow enough time to concentrate on these skills. I would argue that many of these skills can be incorporated into the kodesh curriculum, bringing with them a side benefit of increased respect for the general studies staff (the current disrespect being a large impediment to successfully teaching these skills). I do not believe one need to write and present their thesis on a theme in a Shakespeare work to become proficient in composition. One could present an essay on a theme in the parsha that could be reviewed by the Rebbe and the English teacher. A student could orally present Divrei Torah throughout the year and be graded on their presentation and speaking skills.

Or, as my 9th grade English teacher used to say, I won't tell you what you write about in your journal, just write, write, and write because you will be writing for the rest of your life. I don't know if I believed him at the time. . . . but I'm still writing!