My father used to love the story of me as a 5 year old at a family gathering with my elderly and frail grandmother. It seems she was passing around a box of boiled sweets, and everyone had taken one, but when I reached to take mine she did not see me, snapped the lid shut, turned away and put the box up on a high shelf out of my reach. Feeling scolded and that I had done something wrong, I turned bright red, became teary and went and sat in a corner, head in hands. My father, seeing this, took down the box and gave me a sweet. I jumped up, and ran over to wave it under my grandmother nose, crying "See! See!"
I love that story for the laughter it brought my father, and the fact that "See! See!" has become a family saying - wheeled out when someone feels somehow affirmed, or vindicated in a particular course of action. And it comes to mind now when I read the latest OECD report published a month ago. Alas I am not holding up a sweet now, but a rather less digestible 173-page report entitled Beyond Academic Learning. Here's Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director of Education and Skills setting the context:
Source, p36 |
- are strong predictors of school grades across students’ background, age cohorts, and cities (especially being intellectually curious and persistent)
- are strongly related to students’ psychological well-being after accounting for socio-economic status and gender (especially being stress resistant, optimistic and in control of emotions)
- are related to employment outcomes (other OECD studies shows that social and emotional skills are better predictors of income at age 25 compared to cognitive skills).
One particularly interesting finding that emerges is that young people’s social and emotional skills dip as they enter adolescence. 15-year-olds, regardless of their gender or socio-economic background, reported lower skills than 10-year-olds with the differences being particularly pronounced in cases of skills such as optimism, trust, energy and sociability. The report rightly notes that while developmental factors may play a role here (the teenage years....), educational systems focussed on compliance may drive out curiosity and creativity as students grow older. There is a clear suggestion that heavy emphasis on compliance is damaging - which certainly resonated with us as a school that has just enshrined autonomy as one of its three principles underlying student and adult wellbeing (more on that here).
Reference
- OECD (2021) Beyond Academic Learning: First Results from the Survey of Social and Emotional Skills, OECD Publishing, Paris
- OECD (2015) Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills, OECD Skills Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Interesting that Self-control and Emotional Control are assessed separately.
ReplyDeleteWonder if self-control is the delayed gratification thing (marshmallow test) which is about actions more than feelings
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