Childhood as ‘risky’ and life as ‘skills’

Reframing Life Skills: From an Individualistic to a Relational Transformative Approach

“…This body of literature offers a social-cultural explanation of the knowledge and skills youth learn and use within their communities, and therefore it shows what is valued and why for living within the community. It is skeptical of labeling youth as "at risk", recognizing that this tends to characterize the individual in a deficit way, while overlooking the societal factors that shape how young people can live a good life (Maithreyi, 2017(Maithreyi, , 2019. Finally, these studies are concerned with relational aspects of young people's lives -how the social, economic, and environmental relations, both local and global, have influence on youth's ability to attain a sustainable livelihood and to live life well.…”

Children’s reconstruction of psychological knowledge: An ethnographic study of life skills education programmes in India

“…These developments within professional and academic discourses of psychology, in the 1980s, signalled two new trends – first, wherein larger structural problems such as unemployment and poverty were reconceptualised as individual and personal problems of development, similar to other developmental tasks such as learning to walk or talk; second, they contributed to the reconceptualisation of certain therapeutic practices of behaviour modification as ‘skills’, implying both their educational nature and their applicability to all, rather than to a specific population identified as requiring therapy for some form of psychological condition (Maithreyi, 2015). Post-1980s, the development of a large ‘evidence-base’ on LSE contributed to successfully establishing it as an important form of psycho-educational intervention that was not just ‘curative’, but more importantly preventive.…”

“…5 As part of the frameworks such as EFA, circulated by these different international development agencies, LSE has entered and found place within several national curricula, including India’s National Curriculum Framework 2005 (NCF; National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), 2005). In addition, it has also become an important funding agenda of several aid and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which are currently deploying their own LSPs for children, adolescents and youth (Maithreyi, 2015).…”

“…Drawing on the value-neutral language of ‘skills’ along with the professional psychological language of individual development, teachers and staff of LSPs ‘misrecognised’ (Bourdieu, 1986) their own success as a result of ‘merit’, while constructing children from these disadvantaged backgrounds as individually lacking in this ‘merit’, which they however sought to develop through LSE. This allowed programmes and teachers to establish what Ainley and Corbett (1994) have called an ‘unsentimental approach to individual potential, combined with the social standards of respectability and niceties of a “bourgeoisie drawing room”’ (as cited in Maithreyi (2015: 150)), placing onus on individuals,… to make good use of their time’, ‘to get on with other people’, ‘to present themselves well’, ‘to be responsible’, ‘to stay solvent’ and ‘to cope in most normal circumstances’… [when] ‘normal circumstances’ are those of poverty, homelessness, domestic instability and high local youth unemployment. (Ainley and Corbett, 1994: 367)…”

“…I use the term ‘strategic opportunising’ to draw attention to ‘the ways in which actors strategically and opportunistically respond to the current life situations that they find themselves in’ (Maithreyi, 2015). In using the term strategic , I attempt to highlight the ways in which actors play an active role in making meaning and in responding to their social and discursive contexts; using the term opportunistic , I seek to highlight the myopic nature of these responses, resulting from the limited perspectives that actors can have over their selves and contexts, emerging from their individual standpoints.…”