Limited functional abilities

Name(s):

Lack of emphasis on life skills

Unrecognized need for functional skills

Unlearned fundamental skills

Nature

Simply for means of survival, traditional skills are transmitted from generation to generation, often as soon as a child can walk; for example, a three year old may be started into a future of ropemaking. However, the doubling of human inventions during the past decade has created a gap between the common sense previously adequate for practical productivity and the functional living skills now required for effective social participation. Although local communities may need and wish to profit from modern technology, without the functional skills to provide them with the practical means, people have no way to develop their community in harmony with the rest of the world. Even the limited formal and technical training available competes with time which needs to be used for production, making it virtually impossible to explore and tap other communities' operations and specialized resources.

Such experience provides no means of imagining practical alternatives to the proven inadequacy of traditional methods, leading to undirected fears of inevitable catastrophe: livestock will perish, crops will fail, drought will hit, sons will not be born to relieve the burden of marginal subsistence. The minority who have received formal academic training soon discover that it does not relate to the real needs for operational knowledge in water resource development, agricultural techniques, health care methods, leadership facility or industrial variation. Indeed, because academic skills appear unmarketable in the village context, those few who do develop them eventually move away.

Claim

The gap between the needs of productive industry in present-day society and the training available to provide practical expertise produces unemployment and impedes development. The value of education goes largely unrecognized in many rural communities and community responsibilities are misunderstood or unacknowledged. The residents require mechanical or construction skills, yet lack trained teachers, youth advisors, guidance methods and equipment. Ventures into business are inhibited by the lack of management and marketing skills.

Broader

Lack of ability

Limits to societal learning

Narrower

Undomesticated men

Functional illiteracy

Untrained sewing skills

Limited reading ability

Girls formally uneducated

Lack of method in training

Limited consumer knowledge

Limited gardening experience