Focus on soft skills will lead us astray: Chief Scientist

Australia’s Chief Scientist has criticised the logic behind the push for young people to develop so-called 21st-century skills.

Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel has warned that “as a nation, will go badly astray if we take away from the next generation of workers the disciplinary ladders that we climbed ourselves”. Picture Kym Smith

Australia’s Chief Scientist has criticised the logic behind the push for young people to develop so-called 21st-century skills, arguing the ­nation risks going “badly astray” unless content remains central to the school curriculum.

Alan Finkel has ramped up his case for preserving rigour in the education system, telling a conference in Brisbane that students had to be given opportunities to master a discipline to ensure their ­future success.

Dr Finkel, an engineer-turned-serial entrepreneur, also hit out at the narrative around the changing labour market requiring the next generation of workers to become generalists — developing teamwork, emotional intelligence and creative thinking skills — for ­already having a negative impact on the number of students specialising in mathematics.

Recounting his own experience creating tech company Axon Instruments, Dr Finkel said he ­deliberately sought to hire “discipline specialists who could work together — not generalists who thought the same”.

“I would still build my company the same way,” he said during his keynote speech to the Fifth International STEM in Education Conference last week. “And I worry that we, as a nation, will go badly astray if we take away from the next generation of workers the disciplinary ladders that we climbed ourselves; if we strip back the expectation that students will study hard content, in sequence, through direct instruction; and if we bulk out every study program with the same generic soft-skill components.”

Dr Finkel said the message was already having negative consequences for the number of students studying intermediate and advanced mathematics to Year 12, which was concerning as it was “a skillset fundamental to science, to commerce, to economics to medicine, to engineering, to architecture, to IT”.

His comments, which were backed by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, come amid fierce debate within education circles about how to best prepare students for future ­employment opportunities.

They also run contrary to the apparent thinking within the ­national curriculum authority, which has recently hired US-based 21st-century skills proponent Charles Fadel to help redesign the maths curriculum with a focus on generic skills.

AMSI director Geoff Prince said it was time to quash the myth that a broad education maximised future employability. “All our graduates should be literate, good communicators and able to work in teams, but this must be integral to their discipline training, not an end in itself,” he said.

“This is self-evident but the noise around ‘soft skills’ is distracting us.”

Dr Finkel encouraged Australian universities to follow the ­example of elite institutions in Britain by clearly distinguishing course prerequisites from subjects that were merely useful. “For ­example, students thinking of ­engineering would learn that ­advanced-level maths is essential,” he said. “Generic courses like critical thinking and general studies are less important and … ‘usually better taken only as an extra’.”