We Need to Stop Saying ‘Soft’ Skills and ‘Liberal’ Arts
We should stop using the term ‘soft’ when applied to the human skills of critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity and innovation.
Particularly given the impact of AI technology and automation on future workplaces and the creative imagination. Similarly, using the term ‘liberal’ as a label legitimises the attacks from those in the media, politics and education who seek to devalue the arts and humanities.
I would suggest that phrases like 'real’, ‘human’, ‘crucial’ and ‘vital’ are much more appropriate terms for the skills learned from the humanities and the arts.
As someone who turned his back on an assumed pathway following the ‘hard’ skills of maths, statistics, physics and computing for the study of, and subsequent career in, English Literature and the Performing Arts (for which I was disparaged by my head of “A” Levels), I have never understood what is ‘soft’ about these subjects.
I was drawn to the arts and humanities in my teens, after performing a small role in a play and finding the experience to be far more challenging than playing sports. I then encountered Shakespeare for the first time, which compared to the personally unstimulating experience of studying physics and maths, was something I did not understand but instinctively felt was somehow important. Despite coming from a family where no-one had gone to university or studied such things, I was lucky enough to be a student and teacher in university, exploring how arts and humanities constantly force us to challenge our assumptions and understand the thinking of others.
At no point did I feel I was engaged in a ‘soft’ or ‘liberal’ subject. My undergraduate English degree involved constant engagement with other students and tutors in various forums, lectures, seminars, coffee bars and real bars, often to the point of being kicked out of the pub at the end of the evening still arguing over various positions. I remember bumping into Professor Angus Ross on the train back from campus, talking about his ideas, and continuing the discussion in the nearby station bar. As his daughter’s obituary rightly says: ‘Angus was generous with his knowledge and former colleagues and students often talk of owing Angus a great deal.’
These people were inspiring, engaging and challenging. It didn’t matter if you were a new undergraduate student, you were expected to hold your own ,and if you didn’t understand some ideas you read about them and came back to re-engage in the arguments better informed. This included studying philosophy, cultural theory, psychology, linguistics, colonialism, feminist theory, materialism and many other things.
You had to absorb complex areas of understanding and develop your thinking through intensive debate, grasping the ideas of others and forging new concepts from whatever came out of this melting pot of thought and belief. It was never ‘soft’; it was intense, passionate and vigorous; it didn’t allow easy assumptions, and instead challenged your views on the path to discovering a valid viewpoint, which didn’t prevent others reaching different, but equally valid, conclusions. These are the ‘real’, ‘human’ skills we need in our education systems and the future workplace. Learning to value diverse perspectives, challenging assumptions, and understanding how supposed ‘truths’ are constructions by certain sections of society are ‘crucial’, ‘vital’ skills for anyone to learn to think for themselves.
I studied and performed in works that challenged the accepted values of our society and offered alternative visions of what the world could be like. The work was intensively creative, often going on late into the evening, and sometimes the early morning, driven by a passionate desire to say things that mattered. It remains amongst the hardest things I have ever done.
When I subsequently got a full-time teaching role, I sought to invest this level of passion and enthusiasm in these subjects with my students. I worked intensively with undergrads, postgrads, fellow colleagues and professional practitioners, to create diverse and original work, sometimes learning through failure, followed by the inevitable soul searching as to why the end result had not lived up to the promise from the creative input. Therewere also successes as the students and collaborating academics and professionals came to understand how to develop their creative practice together over time.
I didn’t witness much in this experience that I would call ‘soft’ or especially ‘liberal’, if by that term we mean a sort of unquestioning tolerance to any idea, approach or position anyone wanted to take — as these were constantly challenged, questioned and changed. I did see a huge amount of critical thinking, collaborative working, creative and innovative ideas and problem solving, but these never felt like ‘soft’ skills. In fact, they felt like the skills to have in the world long before AI dominated the headlines.
When I moved into university management roles as a Head of School and Assistant Dean of Faculty, I found that critical thinking skills and robust analysis were as unwelcome as they were desperately needed in the culture of higher education leadership teams.
I very quickly found, much to my surprise (and naivety) that although Universities were focused on learning and teaching, the notion that as institutions they had much to learn about how they conducted themselves seemed to be an anathema. This was even the case in those areas of research and teaching in which they had international reputations, like management, leadership or entrepreneurship. I’m not sure that much has changed, which has perhaps contributed to the challenges the sector now faces.
I remember my first experience of attending the university senior management team meeting. I was there as a new assistant dean standing in for the absent dean. As I was new, I decided to remain uncharacteristically well-behaved and sat mostly quietly during the proceedings. Towards the end of the meeting, the Vice-Chancellor asked all the deans to ensure they provided new students with their timetables two weeks before arrival at the University.
I took responsibility for my faculty’s timetabling, using a computer-based system for preparing timetables in advance. But I knew that some other faculties used paper timetables, created after students enrolled. Notwithstanding this fact, each faculty dean dutifully replied to the Vice-Chancellor that they would indeed provide these timetables to students prior to enrolment.
I was shocked, because I knew this wasn’t possible for at least two of the faculties in question, and highly questionable for a third. I came to an important realisation in my early career in university management — Deans sometimes lie to Vice-Chancellors! In my naivety I had never realised this could be the case. Prior to this, my assumptions about the shortcomings of university management competency had been based on the belief that these institutions sometimes took the wrong strategic direction because of the hierarchies, politics and constant jockeying for status and resources.
To discover such blatant dishonesty in the management environment was a genuine shock to me. I also came to understand that this was not only a mode of behaviour, but was the means by which certain individuals achieved promotion. It had taken me fifteen years to achieve this, which I assumed was due to my lack of experience. I began to understand that many universities have a management culture where significant critical engagement, alternative viewpoints or challenge the dominant perspective is not usually welcome.
I decided to go and speak to the Vice-Chancellor, because I couldn't help thinking he was being duped by this dishonesty. When I went to see him in his office after the meeting, I expressed my surprise that the deans had confirmed they could provide these timetables and stated my view that in some cases it wasn’t possible. He looked at me directly and smiled. And this was my second key lesson in higher education management: Vice-Chancellors (or at least some) often know when their deans are lying to them.
The VC knew the deans were not being truthful but had chosen to let it go for whatever reason he had at the time. I was learning from him that sometimes tackling people head on when they are not telling the truth isn’t the best approach. Not a lesson I always applied in my subsequent roles, unfortunately!
The VC asked me how we could achieve the goal in question and how long it would take. I talked briefly about how it could work and what we could do. He asked me to write a short paper — 2 pages — to sum this up and it would be presented to the next meeting. It was, and it began a process that led to a university-wide timetabling system many years ahead of other institutions, and the VC in question later promoted me to the role of academic registrar and I learned a lot from him.
The point in telling this anecdote is that I believe my education in the ‘soft’ skills of the ‘liberal’ arts led me to be someone who didn’t accept what I was being told just because of who was telling it. I think there are a lot of circumstances, in management teams, board rooms, courtrooms and political arenas, where this is not a ‘soft’ skill but the skill that very few of our senior managers and leaders actually have.
The lack of these skills might also explain the crisis of employee engagement in the global workplace. A recent Gallup survey has stated that the employee engagement rate is 23% globally and concludes that:
low engagement costs the global economy US$8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP — enough to make the difference between success and failure for the world’s development goals.
Perhaps more workers would be much more engaged if they, and those who managed them, had been educated in a way which encouraged the so-called ‘soft’ skills that one learns from an environment which values the arts and humanities in equal measure with maths, literacy and STEM subjects. How many management teams and boards might have created positive working environments that were engaging, inclusive, diverse and inspiring, if they had learned these skills in school and university and applied them in their workplaces?
Many of our unhappy, depressed and disengaged young people and students report that they are struggling with their learning and life experiences. Could we find positive solutions to these challenges through teaching the skills of critical engagement, collaborative working and creative innovation by linking their practice to the principles behind the arts and humanities, as a complement to their subject disciplines?
It is only by designing our education systems around the ‘real’, ‘human’ skills of critical thinking, collaboration, innovative thinking and creative imagination that we will create the engaging education system that our students need for the future.
Future Horizons Education is working on solutions to create this news approach to learning and curriculum delivery - we want to ensure that future learning creates the ‘real’ skills our students need.
