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Existing skills must change according to the needs of the times.
School is the first place outside the home where students begin to acquire knowledge and develop skills; both environments respond to a need marked by the times. For example, around 150 years ago, it was essential to know how to ride horseback to get to a destination faster; now, you only need to learn how to drive a car or use a mobile app to order a taxi. At the beginning of the last century, it was crucial to know Morse code to get a short message over a long distance economically and expeditiously. Today, you only need to know how to use a mobile device or computer to be able to send instant messages to anywhere in the world.
The advancement of technology and the social needs of any historical moment produce the values and pressures that define which skills are in play and must take priority in educational spaces. Therefore, we can say that at present, there are skills that we are losing and others that we are gaining. There are six of them that show the impact of progress towards an era of digital, communicative, and conscious intelligence.
The twilight of calligraphy
When was the last time you wrote a complete page by hand? Calligraphy, a discipline that perfects handwriting, has been quietly disappearing from schools. In Finland, calligraphy lessons are being replaced by typing classes; in the United States, cursive writing is no longer obligatory; in the Philippines, only 20% of seventh-graders in public schools write in cursive.
Due to the extensive use of computers and mobile devices, the activity of writing by hand has fallen into disuse. Schools that continue to teach the discipline do so because, despite being an outdated skill, writing by hand brings benefits to learning, such as developing motor skills, enhancing creativity, improving memory retention, developing critical thinking, and learning proper grammar and spelling.
The analog era has passed
Fifteen or twenty years ago, it was indispensable to know how to read the time on a watch, but the arrival of cell phones and mobile devices put an end to that need. Today, there are so few students who can read the time on an analog clock that schools are considering replacing them entirely with digital ones.
The students’ ability to “tell time” is valued by many teachers, given that it teaches students skills related to logical and mathematical thinking. Learning to read the time is an aid to understanding number operations such as subtraction and fractions.
Uncharted future
Knowing how to read and draw maps was a necessary skill in navigating our cities and countries before the era of GPS, Google Maps, and Waze. Today, we only need to enter an address, and an app will direct us along our route, even telling us where to turn and when to change lanes. These applications have helped many people without a good sense of direction to reach places they would not have been able to reach otherwise. But this has also sacrificed some learning that might be beneficial in an era when reading maps could be something classified as obsolete.
Learning to read maps and navigate with them is an aid in the development of critical thinking, analysis, orientation, spatial dimension, memory, and logical thinking, as well as getting you out of trouble when you run out of data or cell phone battery.
The dawn of new types of intelligence
Many of us born in the time range of Generation X or even in the early years of the Millennials have been in situations where interactions, the treatment of another human being, and teamwork are more complicated than usual. These are activities that require the use of two types of intelligence that we have not paid much attention to until now, namely, social intelligence and emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence refers to awareness and working on one’s own emotions, knowing what motivates your attitudes and your manner of interacting. Social intelligence has to do with the skills with which you try to see another person and communicate something to them in the best way possible. In the workplace, emotional intelligence receives the highest performance indicator; 71% of employees surveyed by CareerBuilder said they valued emotional intelligence above IQ. The survey also reported that employees with high emotional intelligence are more likely to stay calm in a stressful work situation, resolve conflicts more efficiently, and respond to their co-workers with empathy.
Social intelligence, on the other hand, involves using the skills most able to resist automation, and it is comprised of elements such as complex perception, interpretation, critical thinking, conflict resolution, negotiation, and persuasion, among others.
A new code of skills
As more and more dimensions of human life conform to digital space, the learning of coding becomes increasingly essential. There is an app or device for everything, to order a taxi, to sweep the house, to order food or grocery to our home; all of them need software, and that software is written in code.
In the last three months of 2019 alone, Android offered 2.57 million apps, while Apple’s reached 1.84 million. This is not counting computer programs, video games, or software for commonly used tools, such as electric brooms or smartwatches. The software industry has experienced enormous growth in this past decade and will continue to grow by leaps and bounds. With this understanding, we can say that the ability to write and understand code will be an essential skill for the labor market.
Going deeper into reading and thinking
The digitalization of content has provided great advantages that enable the preservation, archiving, dissemination, and public availability of large amounts of information. But we rarely ask ourselves: how much information is too much?
As an example, the average Mexican spends 13 hours daily connected to the internet; of those 13 hours, eight are dedicated to reading digital content. This content can be very diverse, from magazine articles, studies, or books, to the written interactions of messaging and social media sites. What are we learning from everything we read on the internet? Social phenomena typical of digital media such as echo cameras and fake news create a need that did not exist in previous decades. Misinformation and digital discord can lead to misunderstandings, negative or violent interactions on websites, or even global panic when these communication failures happen under the framework of health, financial, or political crises. This excess of information calls for reading with a high level of comprehension, critical thinking, research and source-finding skills, and a constant exercise of empathy and effective communication with interlocutors.
For many teachers, these obsolete skills leave a hole in the system that must be filled with other strategies so that students can learn things like motor coordination, mathematical thinking, and spatial dimensions. However, part of the challenge involves developing the means to provide this knowledge to students without falling behind in meeting the needs of the new labor market and interacting in the social forums where it is necessary to adapt constantly.
What other skills do you think have been lost in recent years? What other skills have the new generations acquired? Tell us in the comment section below.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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