Skilling for Life/Living for Skill: The Social Construction of Life Skills in Ontario Schools

Abstract

Over the course of conducting interviews with teachers, administrators and community workers about life skills programs in the school system and in the community, we came to take a stance opposite to that of the educators with whom we spoke. We found the life skills curriculum in both the separate and public education systems to be an ideological process embedded in administrative concerns about student "attitudes" and student "discipline." The concept of life skills assembles a set of understandings which organizes individuals' lives in the conceptual relevance’s of the labor process. Life skills courses place students' lives and concerns in the curriculum while at the same time providing the basis on which those concerns can be rationalized and fitted to the cultural understandings generated in the capitalist mode of production which characterizes Canadian society. It is a conceptual frame through which the complexity of life processes becomes reduced to a set of skills.