Nick HutchisonFounder and CEO, BookThinkers

Why aren’t soft skills taught in school?🤔

11 Jul 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:01

In this monologue, the speaker contrasts hard (technical) skills—such as math, science, Excel, and PowerPoint—with soft skills, which include emotional intelligence and interpersonal abilities. While hard skills are traditionally taught in school through textbooks and lectures, the speaker argues that soft skills are actually the true hard skills because they require extensive practice, repeated failure, and personal experience to master. Using the analogy of learning to date, the speaker illustrates how soft skills develop through trial and error rather than formal instruction. The central claim is that the educational system overlooks soft skills despite their greater difficulty and importance, leaving individuals to learn them informally.

Chapters

The difference between hard skills and soft skills and why aren't soft skills taught in school? Hard skills are technical skills. You know, you need to learn your math, you need to learn your English, you need to learn your science, physics, chemistry. Those are all important things in life. And those are usually classified as hard skills. Learning Excel is a hard skill or learning to use PowerPoint or how do you work with Zoom or, you know, those, those are all classified under technical hard skills. But the true hard skills to learn are the soft skills. It's much harder to, for example, understand how your emotional intelligence works and how you navigate it and how you improve it and how control it than it is to learn physics or chemistry or whatever. Because usually hard skills, you can deep dive into a technical book, you learn, your head goes through it, you memorize it or you understand it and you're set. You can use it. Soft skills are much harder to learn despite of the name because you actually have to practice it and you have to fail a lot before you understand how it works. It's like when you start dating and you have to find a way of approaching the girl or the guy that you like and you're gonna fail a lot before you succeed. I mean, unless you're very lucky.