The Missing Subject on the Schedule

This week, the kids went back to school. I looked at my youngest daughter’s Grade 11 schedule and came to a horrifying realization: of all the subjects she’ll be studying this year, only two are likely to be truly useful to her at this stage of her development: physical education and visual arts.

I can already hear parents everywhere indignantly pointing out that core subjects aren’t called core subjects for nothing. They provide the foundation for every field of study and apply to an endless range of situations in everyday life.

I agree. But despite my passion for languages and my arithmomanic tendencies, despite my fascination with history and my love of geography, I still believe we’re not teaching young people the right things for the world they live in today.

If the basic rules of English grammar, drilled into them since Grade 1, still haven’t sunk in, chances are they never will. The same goes for French and math. For those students, AI can help bridge the gap. And that’s a wonderful thing.

As for the humanities, curious minds can satisfy their appetite by watching documentaries or disappearing down the rabbit holes of Wikipedia and YouTube. The natural sciences, meanwhile, could be explored in college by those who are genuinely drawn to them.

Physical education, in my view, is vital: it forces young people who are more sedentary than ever to move, hopefully instilling some healthy lifestyle habits along the way. Visual arts, meanwhile, invite them to engage a completely different part of their brain by stimulating creativity. Far from being a mere luxury or ideological nicety, creativity contributes to problem-solving and innovation. That strikes me as more worthwhile to cultivate than the ability to solve algebraic equations, whatever math theory enthusiasts may have to say about it.

The Skill That Cuts Across All the Others

So what could we replace all those subjects with, you ask? Communication.

In my view, there is no more universal skill than the art of communicating. Communication skills will not only be useful in virtually any job these future adults might have, but also in every kind of relationship they will build: personal, platonic, romantic and parental.

I could easily imagine a curriculum built around subjects like these:

• Clear, concise and effective expression
• Listening and comprehension
• Persuasion and influence
• Strategic communication
• Relational and emotional communication

Young people would learn to communicate clearly, both verbally and in writing. They would work with texts to learn how to sharpen their ideas, distill their message, eliminate unnecessary words and repetition, and choose the right words to convey the nuances of what they mean.

They would also learn how to make sure they have understood someone else’s message by asking clear questions, paraphrasing what they have heard and, in spoken conversations, allowing the other person to express themselves and becoming comfortable with silence.

All the English (and French, why not?) they had learned up to that point would obviously serve as raw material—but as an arsenal rather than a constraint. Language would serve the student, their self-expression and their ability to communicate, rather than the student being made to serve the language. That shift in perspective alone might be enough to make languages interesting to those who had previously written them off.

The Mechanics of Influence

Next, to teach persuasive and strategic communication, we would need to introduce students to certain principles of psychology, such as psychological reactance, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and the illusion of transparency, to name just a few.

At the same time, they would need to learn how to spot these mechanisms in other people’s messages so they could distinguish influence from manipulation.

We would also need to teach young people how to think. How to think for themselves, develop their critical thinking skills and challenge their own thought processes. And voilà—a little philosophy thrown in for good measure!

Understanding Ourselves to Better Understand Each Other

And then there’s relational and emotional communication… A subject that could itself be broken down into countless subcategories: self-awareness, developing an emotional vocabulary, active listening, emotional regulation and validation, identifying the need underlying an emotion, managing conflict and disagreement, knowing how to apologize—the list goes on.

And no, these principles are not exclusively relevant to our private lives. They belong in the workplace too, whether we openly acknowledge it or not.

The Real Core Subjects

If we had learned these things earlier in life instead of spending years exploring the same subjects in school from essentially the same angles, we would probably be better equipped, both individually and collectively, to interact harmoniously.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that we teach these traditional subjects, but rather the enormous proportion of the curriculum we continue to devote to them at the expense of skills that are every bit as fundamental.

We spend a dozen years learning how to conjugate, calculate, analyze and memorize, and then we catapult young people into adulthood assuming they will somehow know how to say what they think, understand what someone else is saying, manage conflict, express what they feel and persuade without manipulating.

My experience as a coach suggests otherwise. The vast majority of the issues that come up still revolve around engagement, collaboration, managing disagreements, honest feedback and getting along with others.

And they all have one thing in common: communication.