Asa Stone is a Presidential Fellow on sabbatical doing research with a team on ways to better teach soft skills that industry and machines can’t perform, such as effective communication, empathy, teamwork, and leadership. She’s regularly a teacher of the above at New Mexico Central Community College where she’s a full time professor.
Asa has a complex background as she’s also an aficionado of beer brewing, among other “off the beaten track” pursuits. In a recent article in New Mexico Magazine’s Aug. 2019 issue, she’s asked about the Future of Work.
Those fundamental skills that are typically taught in a classroom, like mathematics, are things that could be computerized or automated. So how can we foster what is uniquely human about unto have a cutting edge in the workforce? That is my job.
When we say that a person is empathetic, what do we see in that person? If we can translate that conceptual characteristic from observable behavior, we will be able to reach that. (understand empathy in practice).
Asa’s comment on the efficacies of teaching mathematics sounds a bit shocking, although it’s been around since the days when calculators started showing up in students book bags. Part of the problem is in thinking of education as one size fits all; the assembly line mass production version of learning. Of course mathematics needs to be taught, but who needs to learn it? Maybe Asa is right, that other skills, for at least some students, are going to be the path to employment and success in the near future.
It’s notable that she lands on empathy as a primary skill or capability needed to “have a cutting edge in the workforce”. One might surmise from the troubles on social media that empathy is too often in short supply there, but we also see that problem in various forms of Darwinian capitalist misbehavior. Such as piratical pricing for certain medications, and the horror inflicted on those who simply can’t afford what they need to survive.
But one presumes she is getting at something a bit “deeper” or “harder to explain” as to what students, learning what skills, can succeed. We are curious as to what her research group might develop. There are others who want to know about success and soft skills, including economists and sociologists, and their conceptions are often involved when government programs are created.
So it’s not far fetched to hope that educational theorists and change agent economists and sociologists can develop models together. Models where those disconnected from the workforce by automation and AI, along with those who never really found standing in today’s economy have a way forward. To that end, see the following post on that very work, featuring economist/ sociologist Raj Chetty.
PSA has presented ideas here that Community Schools are a model of a different form of success, where personal relations in neighborhoods, and family relations including extended family members, work together to enable the success of learners of varying ages. We might assume in such an “incubator” that empathy and soft skills play a big part in “success”.
However we might need some statistical analysis from such as Chetty’s approach to understand better how that works.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
And we might need to hear more about how brewing beer, and socializing around “beer afficiando culture” might have helped Asa Stone in her quest to understand empathy, and what fosters it. Many observers have noted how “pub culture” in Great Britain has supported community and neighborhood relationships, and fostered what we might take as empathy…where one can go and people listen to you, and your story. And you do the same for them.
