Can you teach bourgeoise values in school?

Well I admire the honesty. From Does education strengthen the life skills of adolescents? Secondary and higher education are windows of opportunity for boosting students’ life skills by Stefanie Schurer.

One of my long running efforts has been to create at least some sort of broad framework that allows some ballpark forecasting of personal success. The interest is more in the exercise of trying to get to an answer than it is in a confidence that there is an answer.

My broad working model covers

Knowledge
Experience
Skills
Values
Behaviors
Motivation
Character
Capability

For example, just because you have a high IQ (Capability) does not guaranty great life outcomes. Certainly the probabilities go up but there are plenty of other factors that ensure that there remains a bell curve of outcomes.

There is a reasonable amount of research that leads me to suspect that character is a reasonably strong predictor of outcomes. It is striking to me that of all the many permutations of the Big Five Personality Traits, one is especially common. Senior executives tend to be high in Conscientiousness, moderate to low in Agreeableness, moderate in Openness, and low in Neuroticism. Extroversion does not appear to carry much predictive weight for senior executives.

Which all makes sense when you think about it. Conscientiousness gets things done. Moderate to low Agreeableness means you do not hesitate to disappoint people (which executives have to do since their chief function is to operate within constraints). You need to be open to new ideas, but not gullible. And you simply cannot afford to spin your cognitive wheels (neuroticism).

So Schurer is investigating a whole range of issues in which I am interested. A further connection which we share - If you can identify patterns of attributes which improve your probable life outcomes, can those traits then be taught in school. One would hope, but there are many pitfalls and historically we have had enormous trouble making logical policies work at all or scale consistently when it comes to education.

I admire Schurer's brutal honesty.

Life skills, sometimes referred to as noncognitive skills or personality traits (e.g. conscientiousness or locus of control—the belief to influence events and their outcomes), affect labor market productivity. Policy makers and academics are thus exploring whether such skills should be taught at the high school or college level. A small portfolio of recent studies shows encouraging evidence that education could strengthen life skills in adolescence. However, as no uniform approach exists on which life skills are most important and how to best measure them, many important questions must be answered before life skill development can become an integral part of school curricula.

Translation - we don't know enough about this field to even conduct good assessments. Yet.

She has a good summary which pretty much matches my understanding of the literature.

Click to enlarge.