Social Skills 101: Another Course in the Curriculum?

Children learn a lot more at school than how to spell Saskatchewan and solve a quadratic equation. They also learn to interact with people outside their family. They learn these skills - what are called social skills - the same way they learn everything else, by trial and error, with some guidance and some correction.

Social skills are much like air. We tend to take them for granted and only notice when they're absent. A person's lack of good manners is a lot more obvious than their lack of knowledge, and we remember someone's friendly and polite behavior a lot longer than how many degrees he or she holds.

If that's the case, which is more important to learn, academics or social skills? Carmie McLean of Tusarvik School in Repulse Bay, Nunavut, sees the two as being inexorably intertwined. Academics make the wider world available to the students of this isolated village. "Once they have a grasp of the importance of learning and the options it makes available to them", she explains, "they also understand that different people have different ways of behaving." Once they begin making choices for themselves, development of the necessary social skills will inevitably follow.

Social skills give you the ability to blend in, MacLean says, and give you a sense of belonging. It's not only the specifics of how to act and speak, it's an understanding and awareness of community standards and expectations. Cultural differences determine a lot of our social behavior (for example, the size of our personal space and therefore how close we stand to other people). Not being aware of these subtleties at best makes you as rude or insensitive; at worst, it can lead to being ostracized.

Kathy Forsythe-Lantz from Waterloo-Oxford and District Secondary School in Baden, Ontario, has a different view. She believes that for her students in the Life Skills and School to Work programs, social skills are just as important as academics. A special needs student may never master algebra, but can definitely learn how to behave in a workplace, how to make and keep friends and how to interact with neighbours and the community.

Forsythe-Lantz suggests that social skills give you the ability to protect yourself and navigate an unfamiliar situation. For everyone, not just special needs students, life is a series of new experiences, new encounters, new interactions and new relationships. Social skills, which she sees as the ability to get what you need while giving others what they need, help us steer our way through all these new situations safely.

Both teachers agree that social skills include (and in fact are built on) self-confidence and emotional strength. They depend on both an understanding of what it is to be a good person and a belief that you are a good person. It's easier to like someone who likes themselves. "You're not worth much to anyone if you're not a good person," comments Susan Quinn of Holy Heart of Mary Regional High School in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.

There is no course entitled Social Skills 101. How can schools teach these much needed skills to young people? Classroom and schoolyard interactions among students will take care of much of this learning. But children can be very cruel to each other and some of what kids learn in the playground may need to be undone in the classroom. School and classroom codes of behavior are becoming more common as a way to make acceptable expectations and standards explicit.

Most people have met at least one doctor or lawyer with the social skills of a badly behaved three-year-old. Young people whose academic ability outstrips their emotional development often have a great deal of trouble learning proper social behaviours while those of their age group shun them for their intellectual abilities. Unfortunately, some children solve this dilemma by hiding or neglecting their intellectual potential.

If social skills are largely learned through guided experience, then providing lots of opportunities for social interaction will help students learn how to "play nice" and give them the needed self-confidence and emotional strength. Quinn and Forsythe-Lantz both endorse music therapy and mentoring as an excellent way to teach compassion, patience and understanding to musically gifted and bright students while giving special needs students extra tutoring time, social interaction and emotional boosts. The Special Olympics, peer tutoring and job training ("with lots of monitoring and feedback," cautions Forsythe-Lantz,) also provide useful social experience and training in one of the most important skills for everyone.