“Skills for kids,” Zenhabits.com. This is an excellent list of skills which would be useful to everyone. Good to teach them to kids when they are young. (For my audience, just ignore the whole “zen” thing in the title.)
The one item on this list that we have to balance on is tolerance. It’s a difficult thing to do. We use phrases like “hate the sin, love the sinner” to express this desire. We can’t say that something is okay when it’s not. But we have to love people as Jesus did. So maybe we should replace the phrase “tolerance” in this list with “charity” or “love”?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Good stuff, but nowhere near as new as the author (Leo Babauta) makes it sound.
To me it is the difference between training and education. In the former one learns a set of skills. In the latter one learns how to learn.
A former Dean of the School of Engineering at Robert College (now Boğaziçi University), Istanbul, had written a paper to this effect which I found in my desk when I started to teach there in 1969. And it was a principle I had to large extent learned through some combination of my home life and the teaching methods in my small (~15 per class, two classes to a room), rural, 1940-50s grade and high schools. Training in skills was not lacking. [Although the selection was very limited. I took bookkeeping as my elective as a 10th grader, since it was the only elective there was
]. We learned things such as the proper ways to fold letters, as well as our times tables, and cursive writing (at which I am still a total flop). These were, however, somehow taught in a manner which taught us how to learn, how to teach ourselves. This was certainly reinforced by my 1950s college (RPI) and 1960s grad school (RPI and MIT) education. The first time I became conscious of the fact that I had been and was being taught to learn was in grad school. Then the Dean’s paper at Robert College put it down in black and white.
One thing that to me seems very important: Training in skills was not abandoned in my education at any level. Certain skills were essential, whether they be correct spelling or the ability to effectively use partial differential equations. And they were emphasized, not ignored. These skills were, however, taught in such a way as to teach me how to learn. I suspect that a very important aspect of this was an ever-present appeal to our needing to understand why, not just how, something was done the way it was. Why did one fold a letter in a particular way? Why does 7 + 2 = 9? Why do these things make sense?
Wisdom is the understanding of knowledge. Just ask Solomon’s teacher.