Soft skills in students: Cannot be learned en masse

Soft skills for students cannot be taught or learned en masse, but where there is a lack, learn there. It is not true that just learning means having life skills - Dr. Nguyen Tung Lam, Principal of Dinh Tien Hoang High School, commented. According to him, soft skills, also known as life skills, have a broader scope, they help students to be confident, have courage in life, have future orientation and are the key to success.

Soft skills cannot be taught as a subject.

Why have there been so many cases of student suicides in recent times? These cases were not driven to the brink by violence, but simply because of frustration and loss of faith in life. Obviously, those students lack life skills, also known as soft skills. Dr. Nguyen Tung Lam, who researched and implemented soft skills (i.e. life skills) for students nearly 10 years ago, argued.

Equipping soft skills for students
must be concrete through experience and practical contact

Life skills are now being mentioned and paid more attention to by public opinion than before. The subjects that need to apply life skills are the young generation, especially students. After a series of tragic suicides, people suddenly realized that young people are left to drift freely in the vortex of life, lacking the care of adults, they are not equipped with a full capacity, awareness, and life skills, so they end their lives in the wrong way.

But when the attention and concern for life skills for young people is urgently pushed up, a series of centers and classes teaching life skills are widely taught. From there, parents sometimes have a rather wrong notion that sending their children to short-term "life skills" classes or "success" training classes means that their children will immediately be thoroughly equipped with life skills.

Mr. Lam emphasized that soft skills or life skills are inherently osmosis and experience. They cannot be mass-learned, mass-taught, or taught as a subject. If these skills are lacking, one must find them oneself, must have direction, and must equip oneself. One cannot "be successful" by studying one class after another. Therefore, the notion that just by taking a life skills class one will immediately have life skills is completely wrong. On the other hand, teachers must also be fully equipped with life knowledge, must have practical experience, must know how to observe what students lack in order to give useful and creative directions and impart knowledge.

Lack of soft skills will make it difficult to succeed

UNESCO's recommendation has put forward the four pillars of learning for the 21st century: "Learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be". This trend has developed widely in the world in recent years, focusing on promoting each individual's capacity, asserting oneself in society by orienting the future. However, in Vietnam, the career orientation factor of students is too weak, most of them lack soft skills and life skills, leading to a loss of confidence, not being able to plan a career path for the future. According to Ms. Ha Thi Dung, Deputy Director of the Department of Student Affairs (Ministry of Education and Training), the lack of soft skills of students today is quite clearly shown in the job orientation stage. Statistics from the Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences show that 37% of graduates cannot find jobs due to a lack of social practice skills, 83% are assessed by employers as lacking life skills.

That affirms a reality, students lacking life skills will lead to excessive deviation in thinking and action, easily leading to negative, regrettable behaviors; students lacking soft skills will find it difficult to succeed in life, and those without future goals will find it difficult to achieve. On the other hand, school knowledge is still purely theoretical, heavy on data, students can easily forget or be far from reality after learning. Commenting on this issue, Dr. of Education Nguyen Thuy Anh said that if you want to have good life skills, you must equip them continuously from when they are children. That puts a great responsibility on parents, schools and partly on the role of society. Therefore, the current widespread courses with the general name of "life skills" lasting 1-2 weeks cannot actually equip someone with so-called skills right away. Sometimes, the lack of standards from that way of learning can easily cause an adverse reaction.

According to Daidoanket