Soft skills: A challenge for development
Md Bayazid Khan :
The most relevant as well as burning question for building a country developed is — does it need development in multifarious sectors of the economy only? The answer will certainly be no.
A developed country should have the continuous stream of money-involved and morality-involved development activities simultaneously.
In a developed country, massive development works become visible in the sectors such as industry, agriculture, infrastructure, ICT, trade and commerce, education, tourism, technology etc as money-involved development activities.
On the other hand, morality-involvement development reflects the behavior of the citizens.
It is nourished by the citizens as soft skills development and practices.
A country can never claim to be developed without practicing soft skills by its citizens in daily lives such as applying civic senses and morality, keeping aloof from committing monetary and intellectual corruption, being respectful to law and order, maintaining discipline, possessing humanity with positive attitude, avoiding misuse of public and private resources, being respectful to protect natural resources, avoiding telling lies etc.
Both money-involved and morality-involved developments are the preconditions to make a country developed.
Money-involvement development necessarily requires massive cost effective domestic and foreign investments regarding implementation of multifarious mega and minor projects.
Road to implementation of money-involvement development activities in the process of making a country a developed one also has the existence of both positive impacts regarding benefits and adverse consequences regarding sacrifices of people considering imposed direct and indirect taxes upon them to bear the expenses of investment.
Massive investments in the mega projects for development have the apprehension of committing corruption and irregularities that definitely jeopardize the development process silently like woodlouse.
On the contrary, due to huge involvement of the money or investment-involved development activities, there exists opportunity cost for the citizens to pay as they have to take the burden of reimbursement of loans.
At the end of the day, successes and outcomes of the hard-earning and cost effective mega projects for money-involvement development activities might be evaluated by reviewing the cost and benefit of the projects alongside the sustainability.
If citizens of the country nourish negative soft skills behavior in applying daily lives then all efforts to carry on the cost effective money-involved development activities might be proved meaningless.
Therefore, in conjunction with implementing mega projects for money-involved development, a country also needs to emphasize on developing values oriented soft skills within its citizens.
Bangladesh has a vision of becoming a developed nation. Regards to make the vision a success, massive development activities in infrastructure, ICT, industry and other sectors of the economy either have been completed or running. But citizens have been practicing unethical and non-values behavior and attitude neck and neck that can never be the right way of making the country a developed one.
The government has been spending huge amount of money for development activities in one side and on the other side the country has been experiencing misuse of public, private and natural resources; absence of applying civic senses; practices of dishonesty and immorality; tendency of disobeying law and order; negative attitude of maintaining discipline etc.
Above mentioned practices in daily lives certainly prove to be silent killers that have been crippling the economy and eventually must be threatened to the success of making the country developed.
So, developing values-building soft skills within citizens is as significant as the inevitability of development in infrastructure and other economic sectors for making the country a developed one.
This will need changes to citizens’ attitude and certainly it will be a tough challenge to be addressed. The pivotal change agents could be the students for addressing the challenge.
So, the curriculum in all three tiers of education might be revised with a view to keep the provision of learning and nourishing values- associated soft skills by students.
As they are the future drivers of the country’s economy therefore aforesaid values-building soft skills development initiatives may become successful and will be reflected in future generations’ behavior and attitude in the future.
Moreover, the values-building soft skills development process continues as the students will try to disseminate the learning among citizens and they will take the flagship of resistance whenever found any kind of deviation of practicing morality or values-building soft skills in daily lives.
(The writer works for primary
education).
