Essential Personal Life Skills Should Be a Routine Part of K-12 Education

A chart showing the differences between two different types of education.

It Seems So Obvious! Academics + essential personal life skills = students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in life!

A two-pillar approach to education is needed now more than ever before.

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Essential Personal Life Skills Are a Vital Part of Our Human Development and Education

They consist of skills and behaviors that help everyone know and understand themselves and others, manage their emotions, and achieve healthy life goals. They also include learning how to establish and maintain healthy, supportive relationships, as well as making responsible decisions.

If we consider academic subjects as one pillar of a student's education foundation, essential personal life skills are the other necessary pillar. 

Of course, all parents want their children to be healthy, do well in school and get a good education, and ultimately, get good jobs and become productive members of society. Not coincidentally, employers also want to hire people who have the key traits that are learned through pure essential personal life skills curricula.

Since parents want their kids to get good jobs, and since employers look for the traits that are learned as part of essential personal life skills education, why are they not being taught to all children as a part of quality preschool education for every child, and as part of the routine curriculum in our schools from kindergarten through 12th grade?

If we think of academics as being like a car that drives you, then pure essential personal life skills are like the steering wheel that guides you.

You can’t drive a car without a steering wheel, right?!

A diagram of the five different types of personal life skills.

How Essential Personal Life Skills Fit With What Employers Want and Need From Their Employees

Surveys from businesses regarding the top skills they look for in their new hires and expect to see from their current employees include some or all of the essential personal life skills listed here:

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People may have great academic and technical knowledge, but they can also be terrible employees when they lack emotional intelligence! Surprisingly, many employers rank these so-called “soft” skills higher than the “hard” skills learned through formal post-secondary education.

Academic skills are important, but in many cases they are not as highly sought after by employers as essential personal life skills. These skills are also teachable; the earlier and more often they are taught, the better the students’ lives will be.

These skills fall into the following four categories:

  1. Knowing me

  2. Managing me

  3. Understanding others

  4. Relating to others.

Society has decided that formal education is important for everyone so they can learn academic subjects like reading, writing, math, and science; but why do we largely treat essential personal life skills with less importance?

We believe that essential personal life skills are as important as academics, that they are teachable, and that all schools should be required to teach this as a stand-alone subject, just as academic subjects are taught.

All parents want their children to do well in school, get good jobs, and have healthy, happy relationships. Sadly, too many people don’t learn the essential personal life skills they need, either at school or from their parents, that make success in these areas possible.

A graphic with the text of a question about personal life skills.

How to Use This Site

This website is a free common-sense approach to help ALL people become their best selves and win the biggest game: LIFE.

We advocate for and provide a simple means of avoiding or treating some life issues that stem from the lack of essential personal life skills, and the journey starts with the first step.

Please click on the WE EDUCATE page shown at the top of this and all other pages for a peek at all of the free resources this site offers, which range from a full curriculum program called Alive2Thrive to individual short “sayings.”

This site is not intended as a replacement for professional medical care for physical or mental health problems, which should be addressed by a licensed professional.