Life Skills Curriculum (themes and problems)

The text deals with what is known as the curriculum of life skills (skills in the field of influencing oneself, sociál skills and skills of morally valuable behaviour.). This type of curriculum has been appearing in explicit form in the current framework educational programmes for basic education and gym-nasium (high school) in the cross-section theme „personál and sociál education“. On the basis of his empirical experience of work in training teachers and future teachers and on the basis of empirical probes during work on implementation, the author defines ten problems relating to this type of curriculum. The first concerns the assumption, recorded in practice, that the life skills curriculum is emerging entirely spontaneously. The sec-ond is the divergence between the written form of the curriculum and its necessary form in practice (the acts and behaviour of students). The third concerns difficul-ties with the standardisation of elements of such a curriculum, and the fourth the fact that the „situation“ is becoming the subject matter. The fifth relates to the difficulty of testing the results of such education, the sixth tests the theory that the pupil himself and teachers are becoming the subject matter, and the seventh describes the pitfalls of the high level of personalisation of subject matter in the field of life skills. The eighth problém refers to the influence of all kinds of intervening variables (many from outside the school). The ninth concerns questions about the character of the transformation of the hidden curriculum in this areas into an explicit curriculum. Finally, the tenth draws attention to the peculiarities of the cross-curricular approach to life skills. In summary the text emphasises the necessity of developing a theory of the curriculum of personál and sociál skills in order for the problems in all these areas to be tackled.