A Classical Approach to Durable Skills

We must fuse classical and modern approaches to education and workforce development that cultivates durable skills

In the fall of 2021, America Succeeds, a non-profit that aims to bridge the constituencies of business and education so that every student can “succeed in the competitive global economy and contribute to their local community, undertook an ambitious research project. In partnership with Emsi Burning Glass, America Succeeds reviewed 82 million job postings in search of the most common characteristics employers look for in potential employees. They found that 61% of those job postings requested at least one of 100 identifiable skills that may be grouped into 10 competencies.

America Succeeds dubs these skills Durable Skills, which they define as “skills that last a lifetime” and include “a combination of how you use what you know - skills like critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity - as well as character skills like fortitude, growth mindset, and leadership.” America Succeeds has developed this initial study into a Durable Skills Framework and engages in ongoing research into how education systems can best develop and cultivate durable skills alongside technical skills.

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that in the age of AI (which America Succeeds calls the Age of Agility) schools should emphasize the development of character strengths and virtues as a means of ensuring that graduates are equipped to adapt to the changes that AI could bring to the world. You can see a nice graphic of the character strengths and virtues, 24 strengths grouped under 6 virtues, here.

One thing that immediately strikes me when I look at the Durable Skills Framework next to the Character Strengths and Virtues classification is the remarkable amount of overlap between the two schemas. What I find even more exciting is the resonance between these two classification models and the classical virtues, topics, and themes found in the Great Books of the Western World as organized by Mortimer Adler. You can see this in the chart below (which I put together with the help of ChatGPT).

This level of overlap is remarkable but unsurprising. After all, people are people are people. Always have been. Always will be. No matter the tool or the economic system, the characteristics that allowed people to thrive and to flourish historically are the same characteristics that people who thrive and flourish in the future will call upon. What I’m suggesting, then, is not that schools look to cultivate anything new. Instead, I’m saying that schools can prepare students for the economic and social realities of the future by cultivating their humanity. Whether that is packaged as a durable skill, as a character strength, or as an old-fashioned virtue makes no difference.

To do this effectively, I think that schools should consider the benefits of a taking a classical approach to modern topics. I’m not saying that everyone needs to go to a classical school. In fact, while I am a fan of classical education, I think that many of the staunchest advocates of classical education have blind spots, especially around content and outcomes. What I am saying is that a classical approach to education is better suited to the cultivation of durable skills than the approaches used to great success in teaching technical skills.

First and foremost, a classical approach to education emphasizes formation over information, assuming that education is about shaping character and reason more than it is about job readiness. Happily, groups like America Succeeds are finding that character and reason are exactly the sorts of formative prerequisites that many employers establishing. So, while job readiness is not the focus of a classical approach to education, it is likely that job readiness is one of the outcomes of this approach.

Second, a classical approach is anchored in truth, goodness, and beauty. The classical educator achieves this by framing questions - even modern questions - with enduring philosophical categories:

• What is the nature of the thing?

• What is its purpose?

• What are its virtues and vices?

• How should a free and virtuous person think about it?

Third, a classical approach leverages the three components of the trivium in curricular design. These components are grammar (foundational knowledge), logic (critical thinking and reasoning), and rhetoric (articulation and persuasion).

Finally, a classical approach situates learning material in the broader context of thousands of years of human thinking. There are no new problems. There are only new presentations of the same problems that have always plagued humans. That means that we need not rely solely upon the modern scholarship. To be sure, modern scholarship is critically important, but that scholarship is rendered, at best, inert and, at worst, harmful - maybe even deadly - without proper grounding in the wider arch of human thought and experience. As C. S. Lewis warns, when we fail to properly contextualize modern scholarship, we run the risk of inciting a “rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.”

What does that look like in action? Let’s take a second to consider one brief example. Let’s say that we wanted to deliver a classically grounded unit on communication, adapted to the modern media landscape, while retaining the formative goals of classical education. Here’s what that could look like.

Enduring Questions:

• What makes communication true, good, and beautiful?

• How do media forms shape our message - and ourselves?

• What responsibilities come with the power to persuade?

• How can I become a virtuous communicator in a noisy, distracted world?

Grammar (Knowledge)

• Learn Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, logos

• Read Proverbs on speech and self-control

• Introduce key vocabulary: decorum, amplification, brevity, virality, dialectic, echo chamber

Logic (Analysis)

• Compare Cicero’s rules for decorum with real tweets, email chains, and YouTube thumbnails

• Discuss: What ethical constraints should govern public discourse?

• Group Exercise: Dissect a viral video or tweet for rhetorical devices and ethical implications

Rhetoric (Practice)

• Assignment: Write a persuasive Instagram caption (or tweet, or YouTube short script) that uses all three classical appeals

  • Audience: Classmates

  • Topic: Defend an unpopular but virtuous idea

  • Constraints: No sensationalism, no sarcasm

Notice how seamlessly one can interweave the modern with the ancient. The result should be someone who has developed a working knowledge of what it means to possess one of the most commonly sought durable skills (communication), practice in identifying the different tools of effective communication, and experience leveraging those skills in a modern and relevant way.

I think there is a place for developing an approach to workforce development that harmonizes classical approaches with modern sensibilities. Moreover, I think that this sort of curriculum could be and ought to be leveraged not only in the context of K-16 education but also in workforce development and training programs across all ages and stages of the labor force.

In my dissertation, I made the following observation:

If vocational learning is “learning to earn,” and if earning is increasingly predicated on knowledge work, then vocational learning must be learning that enables knowledge work. The best education for knowledge work, though, is a fusion of liberal education and socially relevant laboratory education, one that couples “activities that are essentially leisure activities,” like thinking, learning, reading, writing, conversation, correspondence, creativity, and research, with experiences that contribute to meaningful economic production within the broader social context. This means that, in modern times, liberal education is a form of vocational education. In addition, a socially relevant laboratory education is a form of liberal education. There simply is no clearly identifiable distinction between the two. . .

This statement strikes me as even more true in the Age of Agility. Fusing a classical approach with conventional education models is the only way that we can ensure that our students have the durable skills both to thrive in the emerging workplace and to flourish in life more broadly.