"Grit" sounds useful, but absent "cognitive" skills, "soft skills" ain't scalded no hogs. Considering your timeline which overlaps a lot of deindustrialization and "shift to service economy," how much of the value of "soft skills" you discuss here is simply rewards for filling "bullshit jobs" a-la Graeber (see https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom ), those being jobs in which workers do not produce anything useful but rather "produce" a lot of getting-along-with-the-boss and other bullshit? "Soft skills" are the skills required for bullshit jobs, not productive work, so even if training can inculcate "soft skills" into would-be workers, those may not lead to any real productivity in the economy.
I disagree with the interpretation of the blog post; it seems like you’re engaging with like, 20% of the content here. To focus on “soft skills” and “hard skills” is missing the point. The dichotomy is itself a poor framing.
Noone is saying that we as a society should have people not learn to make things. That said though, as society, good and services have become more complex, companies have come to value people who can work well on a team and can do the cognitively demanding work that being creative requires. Thats the point here. Prof Deming is saying let’s focus on cognitive endurance and practicing it better prepare students. They will need that resilience.
Id also like to point out that afaik, the bullshit jobs theory has mostly been debunked. See Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell, Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs.
As a small anecdote, I have recently been looking into the history of the semiconductor industry. Its very fascinating and I think is a good example of both technical and higher order skills as described by this blog. You had to be a good engineer yes, but for anything in the industry to work, people had to become more and more organized, better at working as a team and cope with ever more complex, uncertain projects. Just food for thought.
A very accessible distillation of a lot of complex research. Well written! Where I think this piece goes wrong - and your footnote 2 and Bloom pyramid feed into this - is to assume all learning works like math (the example used every time to justify this building blocks way of thinking). What this leaves out is the research on importance of “situated cognition” - that the context in which learning happens matters a lot. This turns out to impact both for how new knowledge and skills are incorporated into memory so they can be used later, and in establishing and maintaining motivation in fostering engaged learning. Starting with an authentic problem that is engaging for learners and then working backwards to the skills needed to solve that problem can be a powerful and effective approach that flows in the opposite direction of bloom.
I found this article insightful and compelling. Thank you for teaching me something new and giving me a different prism to view teaching. I’m mostly sold on the argument you’ve made and will see how I can use it with my students and in my own learning.
I would also greatly appreciate any further reading on this subject that you could recommend. As someone outside of academia, it can be hard to understand the breadth and depth of research and where best to begin inquiring.
Recommendations or not though, this was great. I’m eagerly awaiting your next post.
"Grit" sounds useful, but absent "cognitive" skills, "soft skills" ain't scalded no hogs. Considering your timeline which overlaps a lot of deindustrialization and "shift to service economy," how much of the value of "soft skills" you discuss here is simply rewards for filling "bullshit jobs" a-la Graeber (see https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom ), those being jobs in which workers do not produce anything useful but rather "produce" a lot of getting-along-with-the-boss and other bullshit? "Soft skills" are the skills required for bullshit jobs, not productive work, so even if training can inculcate "soft skills" into would-be workers, those may not lead to any real productivity in the economy.
I disagree with the interpretation of the blog post; it seems like you’re engaging with like, 20% of the content here. To focus on “soft skills” and “hard skills” is missing the point. The dichotomy is itself a poor framing.
Noone is saying that we as a society should have people not learn to make things. That said though, as society, good and services have become more complex, companies have come to value people who can work well on a team and can do the cognitively demanding work that being creative requires. Thats the point here. Prof Deming is saying let’s focus on cognitive endurance and practicing it better prepare students. They will need that resilience.
Id also like to point out that afaik, the bullshit jobs theory has mostly been debunked. See Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell, Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067
As a small anecdote, I have recently been looking into the history of the semiconductor industry. Its very fascinating and I think is a good example of both technical and higher order skills as described by this blog. You had to be a good engineer yes, but for anything in the industry to work, people had to become more and more organized, better at working as a team and cope with ever more complex, uncertain projects. Just food for thought.
A very accessible distillation of a lot of complex research. Well written! Where I think this piece goes wrong - and your footnote 2 and Bloom pyramid feed into this - is to assume all learning works like math (the example used every time to justify this building blocks way of thinking). What this leaves out is the research on importance of “situated cognition” - that the context in which learning happens matters a lot. This turns out to impact both for how new knowledge and skills are incorporated into memory so they can be used later, and in establishing and maintaining motivation in fostering engaged learning. Starting with an authentic problem that is engaging for learners and then working backwards to the skills needed to solve that problem can be a powerful and effective approach that flows in the opposite direction of bloom.
I found this article insightful and compelling. Thank you for teaching me something new and giving me a different prism to view teaching. I’m mostly sold on the argument you’ve made and will see how I can use it with my students and in my own learning.
I would also greatly appreciate any further reading on this subject that you could recommend. As someone outside of academia, it can be hard to understand the breadth and depth of research and where best to begin inquiring.
Recommendations or not though, this was great. I’m eagerly awaiting your next post.
Cheers