Hard thinking on soft skills

The nation’s PK-12 education ecosystem is poised to embrace programs intended to enhance soft skills. Soft skills are generally defined by exclusion as personal qualities other than the formal knowledge transmitted by schools that affect student adjustment, i.e., the effort that students put into their work and their social skills. Such soft skills are far too important for the education reform effort associated with them to suffer the fad-like fate of far too many education reforms of the past. There are danger signs in that regard.