5 Important Life Skills/Qualities that Children of Today need to learn and practice to survive next 50 years.
- To Use- Common Sense:
Apparently not so common. We see that in everyday issues- badly designed products, traffic jams, relationships and everywhere else. I firmly believe that the root of this epidemic deficiency lies in the conventional teaching and parenting methods that discourage the need to question ‘Why’ as well as ‘Why Not’ and all other types of questions in the decision making and fact acceptance paradigm. Eventually hammering out the individual thinking habits along with the supposed common sense.
If my child is to provide any solution to herself or for others and if she steps into the solution design without using common sense, she may do in fact a bigger favour by not undertaking the initiative at all.
It’s interesting to note that experiments to teach common sense to bots powered by AI have consistently failed over time. So with little bit of this, you may also end up saving your otherwise redundant job !
2. Programming:
Every child should start to know at least one programming language and learn to apply the same in a fun way in daily lives. Since automation and software, IoT, plays such a massive role in our day to day lives, it is imperative to know the fundamentals of how these software work and how they communicate with peripheral systems. While languages keep evolving and may not be relevant after a few months, it helps to understand applications better. There is no way around programming any more. Either you code yourself, or you have to work with someone who codes. Knowing these fundamentals can be a lifesaver.
So while it is important for even grown ups to know some basic coding- it is invariably absolutely essential for kids to know how to code.
I can’t wait to teach mine next year !
3. Collaboration:
While you can still have a personality to call your own — you need to collaborate.
As the world shrinks and people get better and better at what they do best- it’s only natural not to reinvent the wheel every time and rather collaborate with others who do their bit best. Clear communication, expectation setting, empathy, sound moral compass and finally good manners. There are only very few jobs left in the world where it’s okay and preferable to live in a cocoon and where it’s not required to work WITH others. Modern organizations believe that many slightly lesser geniuses working together can come to a better solution/result faster than one bigger genius working alone.
4. Mathematics-
Maths makes life easy. People who find mathematics difficult do not approach it from the right direction- is what I feel personally.
Instead of giving it the respect it deserves, they cower in some corner, afraid to come into terms with numbers. People who DO understand numbers know how much relief numbers give. Numbers have a way of warning you way ahead of time when things will fall apart. Numbers are not to be solved- they are to be understood; because they are the answer to your questions.
For people who are not convinced- if someone tells you my work has just started and someone who tell you 30% of my work is done- what gives you better understanding of the situation?
I rest my case.
5. Reverence-
Children of now and adults of future are going to face severe crunch of vital resources like Land, Water, Clean Air and maybe healthy food.
I want current schooling and parenting to align the courses and practices to adopt reverence of these resources, so that reduce-reuse-recycle are not only cool optional best practices but rather duty and habits. In addition to the above, consciousness and awareness of the damage our practices do to the surrounding eco-systems and switching to more eco-friendly habits should be inculcated into our daily being.
The challenge no longer to build awareness. People are directly impacted by many of these issues. An example being how everyone is aware of how firecrackers and burning the forests cause annual asthma festival in Delhi every winter. And Yet.. wait until November 2019.
The new challenge is to make eco-friendliness “easy” to adopt. Because people still choose habit/tradition/convenience over self and mass destruction. New challenge is to have reduce-reuse-recycle not feel like some supreme sacrifice. To set comprehensive machinery set in place to finally attain a rather simple objective of clear air, land and water.
And for that kind of hard work- they will need deep reverence for the remaining resources to begin with.
