Why I believe in Key Skills - Stuart North
I first came across key skills about two years ago while unemployed.
I had finished a degree in psychology a year previously, and had just moved to
Bath, deciding the world held better things for me than cleaning toilets at the
local army base in Warminster. Despite this brave start, I found work to be almost
as elusive in the city as in my home town. I eventually became involved in a program
run by the employment service under the name of "Training for Work".
Part of my involvement with this program was the study of 'key skills' at the University of
the West of England. These skills are:
- Improving Own Learning and Performance
- Working With Others
- Communication
- Problem Solving
- Information Technology
- Working with Number
The important thing about all of these skills is that they are transferable
from one working situation to another. In the case of improving own learning and
performance, one sets targets, identifies strengths and weaknesses, as well as setting
a time at which to review progress while using feedback from appropriate people.
This process of learning is just as valid when applied to the perfection of a left hook,
understanding an internal combustion engine or learning to use a computer. Likewise the
essential skills which are used while working with others to organize a new teaching venue,
a course or visit to another club, are just those skills used when working with colleagues
to advertise a new commercial enterprise or prepare for a financial audit.
Much of my work at this time focused around martial arts due to my own enthusiasm for the
subject. Targets included getting my black belt for both Judo and Aikido and I found that
the use of the key skills format lent my practice a more focused feeling as well as helping
me to train through times when I felt I was not improving, something experienced by most
martial artists at one time or another.
Due to my experiences with key skills I came to feel that this practice was potentially of
real importance to martial artists. Many people feel that our training can relate to our
whole life rather than just being a form of self defense. Within many of the Japanese forms
this is indicated by the use of the kanji 'do' indicating the practice to be a way of life.
This can be seen in such examples as Judo (the way of gentleness), Aikido (the way of harmony)
and Karate-do (the way of the empty hand).
Despite this, the process by which a student's character is bettered, usually fails to be
made explicit in any way, the effects being assumed to take place almost by accident or as
an automatic by-product of training.
Through the use of key skills, a process by which martial arts improves a students abilities
outside the arena of the dojo, becomes explicit to the extent to which it can be documented
and accredited within formal education.
I remember as a nine year old judoka hearing that judo was relevant to one's whole life.
Unfortunately nobody was really able to answer my questions as to how this was possible.
It took me about ten years before I began to appreciate what this meant.
Attempting to integrate education with martial arts is not a new undertaking. Jigoro Kano,
the founder of judo and professor at Waseda University, saw the decipline and art of judo
as a form of both physical and moral education. So successful was this enterprise that he
was eventually made a Japanese Minister of Education.
Although I have become a great believer in key skills as an aid to training,
I do not consider them, however useful, to possess the depth or complexity which
the practice of martial arts offers the serious student.
The way is, after all, a life's work, whereas N.V.Q.s only go as far as level 5.