On Wednesday 15th July the world will celebrate the first World Youth Skills Day. “On 18th December 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus, a resolution, spearheaded by Sri Lanka, declaring 15th July as the World Youth Skills Day. Sri Lanka initiated this resolution, with the assistance of the G77 & China, to highlight at a global level, the importance of youth skills development. The goal is to achieve better socio-economic conditions for today’s youth, including as a means of addressing the challenges of unemployment and under employment” (www.un.org).
This UN designated day “seeks to generate greater awareness of and discussion on the importance of technical, vocational education, and training and the development of other skills relevant to both local and global economies.” (WorldSkills).
In T&T we need to reflect on policies/programmes relating to youth skills development. Do we have a shared vision about the kind of young persons we wish to nurture? Do we have an effective framework to guide, support, and empower our youths? What are some of the signs that we are failing our youths?
Our education system continues to focus on those who fall within the top 200 in exams. Many youths are illiterate/functionally illiterate and cannot access the curriculum – which does not meet the needs of 21st Century students. What about our many missing children and the 4,000 or so students whom the Minister of Education says drop out of schools annually; and the many socially displaced youths on our streets. What kind of skills are they developing? Are they optimistic about their future?
The media highlight youths with high-powered guns and ammunition. Years ago the then Minister of National Security said there were 85 gangs in T&T. How many are there now? Day after day we read about the wasted lives of our young men in particular – caught up in a maelstrom of violence. The fact that our detection rate is so abysmally low makes life seem cheap in T&T.
How can we develop the skills of our youths when society itself does not seem to value the lives of our youths, e.g. some believe that the OJT programme is used as cheap labour. We seem to have resources for all kinds of projects and buildings, yet we continue to house our minor female offenders in the same compound as the adult female offenders. The situation is the same for minor male offenders in Tobago. What programmes are available to these youths to develop their knowledge, skills and ability and to help return them to society as productive citizens?
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Have we given much thought as to the kind of skills our students/youths need in order to succeed in today’s world? Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, says that “students could fail at life because their schools are too busy teaching to tests.”
Meris Stansbury reports that in Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need–And What We Can do About It, he presents the following list of seven “survival skills” that students need to succeed in today’s information-age world:
1. Problem-solving and critical thinking;
2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence;
3. Agility and adaptability;
4. Initiative and entrepreneurship;
5. Effective written and oral communication;
6. Accessing and analyzing information; and
7. Curiosity and imagination.
He said in an address to the US State Educational Technology Directors Association that “economic change will come as soon as classroom and national practices involving instruction change as well…A lot of people think the skills that students need to learn for the workforce and the skills they need to learn to be a good citizen are two separate sets. But they’re not. What makes a student successful in the global workforce will make a person successful at life.”
We desperately need to nurture moral and spiritual values in our youths to assist them in decision-making/character building. However, we cannot achieve these goals without addressing issues of parenting, poverty, social exclusion, corruption at all levels and so on. Children learn what they live. Let us be role models and mentors and journey with our youths to help them develop the skills they need to survive.
