Once the son of a millionaire asked his father: “Papa, since we have enough money, what will education do for me? Will it teach me how to earn more money?”

The father replied, “Son, education will prepare you for life; earning money is only one of the things it will teach you.”

Preparing for life means acquiring skills which will help an individual live life to the full. The skills needed for successful living are known as life skills. According to the Wikipedia “Life skills are the skills necessary for successful living, whether that be with a family, career or institution.”

In 1997, the World Health Organisation (WHO) enumerated the life skills an individual needs to develop to lead an optimal or near-optimal existence. They are: self-awareness, empathy, problem solving, decision making, effective communication, interpersonal relations, creative thinking, critical thinking, coping with emotions, and coping with stress.

In recent years, several institutions and organisations claiming expertise in developing life skills of children and adults have mushroomed. Although there is no closure on the issue of whether we need separate classes for life skills training or should they be included in regular school curriculums, there is an emerging consensus on the necessity for life skills education. In UNICEF’s view, “Life skills-based education is a critical component of quality education. It can enhance the value of traditional subjects, such as literacy and numeracy, as well as topics of increasing relevance to young people, including human rights, gender equality and peace.”

This viewpoint is endorsed by the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCERT, 2000). “Education, by and large, suffers basically from the gap between its content and the living experience of students. Education must ideally prepare students to face the challenges of life. For this, it needs to be intimately linked with life skills, the abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life, by developing in them generic skills related to a wide variety of areas such as health and social needs,” says the framework charter.

According to NCFSE, life skills are temporal, spatial and contextual. “There are certain core life skills, such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, self-awareness, coping with stress, decision-making, creative thinking and generative thinking, interpersonal relationships and empathy. These are of enormous importance for successful living.”

Yet quite obviously, life skills cannot be developed in one or two days. To incorporate them into education systems, we have to make our classrooms and pedagogies life skills oriented, irrespective of the subject being taught. Every subject can be infused with life skills content. Indeed it’s exigent to make our classroom instruction and evaluation system life skills oriented. This can be done in several ways. Some examples:

• Forming new words. Children need to be encouraged to develop new words which could be a combination of two existing words e.g egoflute, ‘He is blowing his egoflute’. Such exercises will sharpen critical thinking and creativity. After all words are not God sent, people have made them.

• Situational analysis and role-play. Ask your students to analyse a given situation from a well-known text and predict what will happen next. You could also ask them to transform prose into poetry and vice versa.

• Going beyond textbooks and rituals. The famous story of lower caste archer Eklavya ends with the latter gifting his right thumb to Dronacharya as gurudakshina, so that the guru’s upper caste pupil Arjun is not bested. We don’t bother to ask, “What happened to Eklavya after that?” Children could be asked to speculate upon Eklavya’s life story after he made the reverential sacrifice to his teacher.

In maths, numerous formulae are imposed as a matter of rule, without teachers bothering to explore the logical reasoning behind them. For example: “When any number is multiplied by zero, the answer is zero.” Why? “Two negatives make a positive number”. Why? “When we divide any number by zero, the quotient is either infinity or undefined”. Why?

Similarly, round the year the school calendar highlights numerous festivals and anniversaries. They are celebrated routinely, without teachers explaining their significance. For example, every year February 28 is commemorated as National Science Day. Students need to research why this particular day is designated as such and the history behind it.

It is said, “A good teacher never covers the curriculum, he uncovers it.” Going beyond textbooks and classroom rituals will help awaken the innate curiosity of children and sharpen their spirit of enquiry. That’s the first step towards incorporating life skills education into everyday curriculums.

(Shailendra Kumar Gupta is principal of the Eklavya Institute of Teacher Education, Ahmedabad)