Life skills of Australian adolescents

Conclusion

Our concern, then, is with the acquisition of life role skills by Australian adolescents. The expectations placed on young people today, at a time of rapidly changing values, technologies, and economic and social circumstances, make the transition from adolescence to adulthood increasingly more complex. Skills involving relationships, judgement, communication and presentation of self, as well as more specific action skills, are increasing and seen as basic to the educational process. They also involve considerable knowledge of society, community, the world of work, and technological innovation. Such skills we conceive of as life skills.

How these skills might be perceived as concerns and needs by young people themselves, how such skills might be conceptualised, how they might be acquired and on what kind of learning settings, are some of the issues that we have raised. We believe that how life skills are dealt with in schools, colleges, and CYSS centres to meet the changing needs of Australian youth, may well be one of the most important educational issues of the 1980’s, of significance not only to young people themselves but to the functioning of society at large.