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Social Skills Education

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Our topic today, social skills. Social skills, so continuing the general topic of true education. As John Taylor Gatto mentioned, as I have mentioned before, also, social skills are incredibly important. They’re a very important part of education, a true education, a real education. Right? What are social skills? Well, the ability to interact with other people in a skillful way, in a polite and civil way.

I guess at the first level of social skills we would have basic politeness. Good manners. Just basic politeness. This is just our society needs that to have a good society, a close society. In fact, this is one of the things I notice in the west, yet another problem of the west caused by the schools and the media and Marxism and all the garbage on TV. Many, many reasons but we have an uncivil society, a very rude society. When I travel around Europe, when I travel around the United States, people are just rude. It’s just more open that people are rude. Therefore there’s a feeling that the society is divided because even in just basic interactions, basic social interactions, people are rude. Commonly rude. Not everyone, not all the time but it’s very common.

This is true for customer service. It’s true when you just interact with people. There are just tons and tons of rude people and it makes the whole society weaker. Now, I compare this to Japan, which is a super polite society. Almost never do I meet a rude Japanese person. It happens occasionally, occasionally where a Japanese person may be talking loudly on their cellphone in a coffee shop, for example, which is very rude but it’s not common. It has happened to me. I have seen it but it happens all the time in America and in Europe, too. All the time. Constantly. In fact, I like to go to coffee shops to work and I’d say almost every single day, every time I’ve gone to a coffee shop in the United States somebody somewhere in the shop is talking loudly on their cellphone. Super rude, annoying everybody else, talking extremely loudly. There’s just this rudeness that goes through and that’s just one tiny example.

Social skills have gone down and down and down as our forced schooling and our system in the west has gotten stronger and stronger. Media causes this a lot, too, because children are watching so much television and movies. Watch children’s television sometime. Watch a show designed for children and really listen carefully and watch how rude the children are. The heroes of the story. If you watch the Disney Channel, they’ve got a lot of shows, and they’re always telling little jokes and being rude and the message is that rudeness is funny, rudeness is cool. The kids get trained to be rude.

That’s the first level of social skills. The next level of social skills, I would say, would be conflict resolution. Dealing with conflict. Dealing with disagreements. What happens when two children both want the same toy? One has the toy, the other one wants the toy. They start fighting about it. Give me the toy! This is the beginnings of very basic social skills, important social skills, that in the world we have to deal with other people and sometimes we both want the same thing or sometimes we disagree and want different things. How do we deal with that socially?

Being able to discuss it and communicate about it and reach an agreement, that’s a very, very important social skill. We need that for all our relationships. Our friendships, our dating, marriage, all of it. Work. That’s a super important social skill and something that really small children need to learn. I believe that skill’s more important than reading and writing. I believe that basic social skills, the politeness and conflict resolution, those need to be taught first when they’re very young. You start teaching those before you worry about reading. Forget reading, forget writing.

Social skills, these two especially, are much more important. Reading and writing can come later.

Then, finally, I would say the third category of social skills would be persuasion, influence. That includes things like public speaking, writing, sales, leadership, all of those things, which are things you can start developing with kids maybe around the age of seven or eight. I think they’d be ready to start learning some of those things and certainly they could become quite good by age 13, 14, 15 if they were taught that.

Here’s the problem, once again. Schools teach none of this. One of the common things I hear about home schooling, because you know that I love home schooling. I believe home schooling is the answer. Teach your own children. Not some government employee. One of the objections, one of the things people say is what about socializing? If my child is home schooled, how will they learn social skills? You think about that question, what they’re saying is they believe that children learn good social skills in school. That’s what they’re saying. They are saying that they believe that children will learn better social skills in school than with their own family. I always think about this when people are arguing against home schooling or they’re talking about schools, I always think did you go to school? Do you remember? Are you so old that you already have forgotten what school was actually like?

I still remember what it was like. I also have been in schools as a teacher more recently and I see what it’s like. Those children are not learning social skills. Not good ones. School is like a prison. It’s a prison environment. Like prison, they are forced to be in a building together. They are locked in that building. They cannot escape. They are not allowed to leave. They are forced to be there even if they’re unhappy, even if they are being bullied and they’re victims, they’re forced to be there. Even if they hate it, they are forced to be there. Just like prison. It’s part time prison for children every day.

Like prison, the kids are watched, watched, watched all the time by the guards, the teachers, the administrators, right? They have no privacy in school, very little privacy. Their locked in a room. They’re forced to sit, they’re forced to do work they don’t want to do probably, not interested in, bored. They’re forced to be in a very unnatural situation with other kids of the exact same age. 20, 30, 40 kids of exactly the same age. This is completely unnatural. If you look at any natural human society, outside of schools, you see a mix of ages. You see older people, elders, like 60’s, 70’s, 80’s. You see middle aged people. You see younger adults. You see young adults and teenagers and you see children of all different ages. That’s a healthy family. That’s a healthy society. All mixed ages because every age has something to teach, has something to offer.

That’s how we learn true socialization. Our society has all ages so if you grow up as a child and you’re only around other people of exactly the same age, you’re not learning social skills. Not good ones. You think about it. You put a bunch of six year olds together and you think they are going to learn good social skills. Who’s teaching them? The teachers don’t teach social skills. They teach obedience. Sit down, be quiet, do what I say but they don’t teach them how to talk to each other, how to resolve conflicts, how to be influential, how to be a good leader, how to be polite. They’re not learning any of that from the teacher so the schools are not teaching it so where are they learning these social skills magically?

Well, many parents believe they learn it from other kids. Really? That’s who you want to teach your kid social skills? Another kid. Another six year old is going to teach your child how to be good at socializing. This is the mentality. This is what parents believe because they don’t think. That’s crazy. That’s idiotic.

They’re going to learn skillful social skills, effective social skills, polite and effective and powerful social skills from adults. That’s your job as the parent. Not throw them into a group of 30 other kids their same age and hope they learn something about socializing. Let me tell you what it’s like. It’s like Lord of the Flies. Did you ever read that book? Lord of the Flies? That’s what happens when you put a bunch of kids the same age together and you lock them in together. It’s a good book. You should read it. Of course, it’s extreme. The writer, the author, was making a point but basically what happens is it turns into a system of bullying. That’s what happens in schools. All schools. It’s bullying.

Bullying is the social skills they learn. That’s the social environment in schools.

There are three groups, typically, in schools, in a class, in a school. Three groups of bullies or bullying. There are the bullies, group one. There are the victims of bullying, group two and then there are the I call them the hiders or the invisible.

The invisible are the ones who they do everything possible not be bullied. They don’t want to be victims of bullies but they’re strong enough or mean enough to become the bullies so what do they do? They just try to be normal. Just be the same. Be the same so the bullies don’t notice them. They won’t help the victims of the bullies because they’re afraid. They don’t want to become victims themselves.

They don’t want to become targets. That’s the biggest group. The hiders, the invisible.

Most of the kids, they’re conformists. They learn very quickly. They learn this age five, six. Very, very quickly they learn that if they’re strong to be bullies then don’t be different because who are the victims of bullying? Who gets bullied in schools?

The kids who are different. The kids who are different and who aren’t strong enough to fight back. If a kids different and he’s really strong and tough, well, maybe he won’t get bullied because he’ll just punch the other kids and they’ll stop bullying him. If the kid’s not strong and he’s different, or she is different in some way, socially different, physically looks different, it doesn’t matter really. Any excuse. Any excuse. If they’re a little bit weak and they’re different, they become victims of bullying.

Their life becomes miserable and nobody helps them. Teachers don’t help. It just keeps going on and on and on. Nobody does anything. The schools don’t help. They make a lot of noise and they talk about anti-bullying and do stupid little classes but nobody really helps. Nobody stops the bullies. They can’t. It’s a prison environment.

Just like in prison, there are guards but there’s a terrible bullying system. If you read about, there’s rape and they abuse the weaker prisoners. It’s horrible, as you can imagine. Guards are there. They can’t stop it. Same for school.

What happens? Most of the kids, they see these poor victims of bullying. They see how miserable they are, how unhappy they are. They’re being bullied every day.

They’re so sad because they’re different. What do most of the other kids think?

Don’t be different. Don’t be different. Just be the same, be the same as everybody else then the bullies won’t notice us. Don’t challenge the bullies. Don’t make them mad. That’s how, again, it’s another system for teaching people to be weak and passive and to obey, obey. Be the same. Be the same. Don’t be different.

You can see this system, this social system, in schools. It’s terrible for the invisible, the largest group. It’s obviously terrible for the victims of bullying. So sad. Some of them kill themselves when they become teenagers but you know what? It’s also a bad system for the bullies. You think maybe it’s good for them. You know, it’s good for them when they’re young. They’re the big, tough guys. Girls, too. Girls do it, too, to other girls especially. They get to feel strong but what happens is these bullies learn that being a bully and being mean and terrible is a good way, is a good idea.

It’s a good method. The problem is most of these bullies, they don’t do well with learning, right? In a way, they’re kind of obedient, too.

Often, what happens to these bullies is when they actually grow up to become adults that method doesn’t work anymore because suddenly they’re in the real world with people of all different ages and in the real world, you can’t punch people anytime you want. You can’t hit them. You can’t use physical violence to make more money and become successful unless you’re a criminal. What happens is they don’t have the life skills to succeed out in the real word outside of school or prison or crime. A lot of these people actually end up quite miserable as adults. It’s a bad system all the way around. That is not good socializing.

If you think that sending your kid to school will help them learn social skills, you are crazy because that’s all they’re going to learn. One of those three. Be invisible like everybody else, become a victim or become a bully. Much, much better is homeschooling. At homeschooling, where do they learn social skills? From you, a responsible adult who loves them, who hopefully has pretty good social skills. You teach them. If they have a brother or sister then even better. If they have a brother or sister, they start arguing, fighting, then you stop them and you teach them how to talk to each other, how to negotiate, how to create rules about socializing, about using and sharing toys. Whatever. How to be polite, good manners, how to work together. You can teach them all of that directly at home every single day. Even if they’re an only child, well, you’re there so you’re a person, too. That’s socializing.

You teach them how to socialize with you. If they’re rude to you, if they start screaming and yelling then you calmly teach them that that’s not acceptable behavior and you teach them how to talk to you when they’re unhappy. You teach them how to talk to you when they disagree with you, when they want something.

Right? That’s your job. You are the best teacher for your kid. They’re not going to learn that from a teacher in school. Come on. You remember. Were you taught these things directly by teachers in school? I wasn’t. I’ve never seen any teacher ever do that, ever teach any of that stuff and certainly the other kids don’t know it so they’re not going to teach it either.

Yet, more than grades, more than tests, more than degrees. Bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, PhD, all that stuff that everyone focuses on. Parents, kids, students. Oh, they’re so focused on that but I’ll tell you the truth. The secret to success in life, social skills. That’s where the money is, okay, and so many parents, when they think success they mostly think of money, getting a good job. You know what? Fantastic social skills - that’s how you make money in this world, okay? I’m telling you the truth. It’s not a degree. Just having a bachelor’s degree in business or a MBA doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. Everybody has one. It doesn’t help. It’s not going to insure success in business or a good job.

Great social skills. That’s what gets people to become more successful.

It starts at the basics again, being able to deal with conflicts and be polite and be civil and be likable. That’s the first step. That’s just basic but then of course, leadership ability, persuasion ability, the ability to sell your ideas, to convince people to do things. That is the master skill. Look at the people who become super rich. That’s how they do it. People talk about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and they think it’s because they were geniuses at computers or something. They weren’t. Yeah, okay, they knew something. That’s not how they became super rich.

Steve Jobs did not become super rich by being a great programmer. He became super rich by building a company, by his persuasion and leadership skills. He hired great programmers.

Yes, he did some of it in the beginning but that’s not how he became a billionaire.

He became a billionaire through social skills, incredible leadership ability. Same with Bill Gates. Same thing. He built a huge company. It was all those people in his company doing the work. They were the ones doing all the work. What was he doing? Leading. Persuading. Making decisions. Even at a smaller level, where do people go to make the money in most companies. They become managers, right?

There’s the people doing the work. That’s usually at a lower level in most companies and then if you want to make more money, you have to become a manager. What’s a manager? A leader. You move up the company and you stop doing the work yourself and instead, you become a leader where your job is to persuade, to lead, to motivate. Social skills. That’s where the money is in life, in most companies, in most careers.

You got to teach this. If you have children, you must teach this to them directly. The best way to do it is by homeschooling so you have them all day at home and then you can really work every day to develop these great social skills. You start, of course, with basic politeness and conflict resolution and just that basic stuff but then as your child gets older, teach them leadership. Get them to read leadership books. Get them to read about persuasion. Teach them public speaking. Have them give presentations to you and to do presentations on video so they learn how to be persuasive through talking, through public speaking. That is a master skill for life.

If both parents work, then you still need to teach these things at home because they’re not learning it in school. They’re just learning to be an idiot like all the other kids, okay? Socially. You got to teach these things. They need to learn independently. Now, what if you’re not a kid? What if you’re not a parent? You got to learn this on your own because let me tell you, you did not learn it in school. Yes, most people eventually in life, they figure out how to be polite enough. That basic low level of social skills, we all have to learn it to survive. Most learn it by being invisible, being nice and that’s all. That’s a very low level, basic level of social skills.

As I said, the true power comes from influence, being able to influence other people. That’s leadership and persuasion. Public speaking. Most people never learn that skill even as adults at any age. They never learn those skills and therefore, they’re very limited. They’re limited in their job and career. They’re also just limited in other areas of their life. You’re always limited. If you’re always trying to do everything alone, you’re super limited in life. If you have a business, you need customers. If you have a business all by yourself, you have no customers, you have no business. You have no money. You have to have customers. To have customers, you have to persuade, you have to sell, you have to serve them. You have to have great social skills. You must develop them.

Again, within your career as working for a company. If you only just do your own work and you don’t talk to people, you’re not persuasive and you have no leadership skills, you’re limited. You’re not going to go very far. You’ll be stuck in your little office doing your work alone and you’re never going to get promoted very hard because you don’t have the social skills, the leadership. If you want to go higher, if you want to have more influence, make a bigger contribution, you need those advanced social skills. This is true even if you’re just volunteering.

Let’s say you’re just volunteering for a charity. Again, well you can just be at the lowest level, maybe. Just helping them clean the floors of the building and doing little volunteer tasks like that. That’s okay but if you want to have more influence, bigger contribution to help more and more and to help more and more people, if you want to go there for hire in that charity so you can have more impact on the policies, you need those advanced social skills. Persuasion, leadership. This is vital. I get so crazy sometimes. I get so frustrated with parents. They focus so much …

They’re so brainwashed … They focus so much on the stupid school stuff, grades and tests and they don’t realize that it’s not that stuff that is most important. It’s the social skills. Ah. You should reverse it. I’m not saying reading’s not important.

Of course reading is important. Of course it is.

The social skills are more important and need to come first and they are mostly ignored, especially the advanced ones, mostly ignored by parents and totally ignored by schools. In fact, not only are they ignored by schools, they are made weaker by schools. If you can, homeschool your kid and the first thing to do …

People say oh, what should I do? How should I homeschool? Relax. It’s easy. It’s easy. The first thing is focus on these social skills with your kid. If your kids rude, if your kid has no self-control, that’s the first thing you need to teach and to be working on every day in a firm but caring way. You need to be teaching your kid how to talk in a polite way, in an assertive way, too.

You need to teach them those great communication skills and emotional selfcontrol.

That’s the first thing you must teach them before you worry about all the reading and writing and math and stuff. Then, after that, you start teaching them the more advanced social skills and of course, also, reading and basic math. It’s really just two subjects academically. With great reading and basic math, they can learn anything else. Don’t worry about it. The social skills, however, are more complicated. That’s where you really need to be focused. If you’re a young person and you’re being forced to go to school by your parents, you should start reading books about persuasion and leadership and conflict resolution and negotiation. You should be constantly reading books on those topics. That’s a good place to start your independent learning because a lot of times younger people, they don’t know.

Where should I start with my independent learning? Should I read about history and classic literature? Yeah, sure, of course but also focus on those social skills.

Again, the psychology of success not Sigmund Freud. That’s a bunch of crap. The psychology of success. The psychology of leadership. That’s a big one. Influence, leadership, persuasion, sales, negotiation. Learn those skills Read, read, read, read on those topics. This will help you at any age. You will achieve much great success in life as you master those skills. It’s how I built my own business.

Automated 2: You see in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.

A.J. Hoge: You see in this world there are two kinds of people, my friend. Those who send me a message on Twitter or Gab and those who don’t. Those who do might get their question answered like today. Roman on Twitter … My Twitter is AJHoge. AJ H-O-GE.

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Okay, Roman actually has a comment. Just a note, you’re last Effortless English show so much relates to my life. I’m 25 years old and I still act like an immature freaking kid. Well, that’s very honest of you and that’s great. It’s good to be honest.

The first step to changing is to be honest about the problem and to be responsible for it. I was honest in that show, too. No need to feel bad because in that show I said I was 27 and still felt like a kid and acted like an immature kid. It really wasn’t until I was well into my 30’s where I started to act more responsibly and really think of myself as a man, which is so sad to me, but hey, it’s the truth. Hey, I’m with you.

Roman, no problem. I understand. I was the same.

The problem is our whole culture now, everywhere in the world, encourages us to remain children, to think like children, to be immature, to be weak, to be childish.

Right? We’re encouraged. Every TV show and movie we watch, the characters act like idiots. They act like immature children. I see it all the time on TV shows where someone who’s 25 or even 35 or even 45 and they’re still acting like children.

Childish. They’re acting in a childish way, in an emotionally immature way. You see it in the movies and then of course, even people around you. Our parents sometimes can encourage us because they want to treat us like little kids still.

That’s the first thing to realize. If you realize I act like a child and I’m 35, it’s okay, don’t hate yourself. Okay, but realize there’s a reason for that. You were taught that, you were trained that and you’re being brainwashed about that but it’s the first step to wake up. The next step is to make a decision. I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m going to start acting like a man or a woman. It doesn’t mean you become boring. No. It doesn’t mean you don’t laugh and have a good time. No, not at all. It doesn’t mean that. It means you take 100% responsibility for your life. You don’t blame and complain and whine and it means you make strong decisions and you accept whatever happens because of them. You don’t wait for people to tell you what to do. You just decide and do it and you don’t apologize. You just do it.

You move forward with your life decisively.

Number three, I guess, is you start working on your emotional control. That’s a big one. I admit it. I still even have to fight this myself. Emotional control. It’s one of the things that supposed to be different about children and adults. Children are just …. They just cry and act like babies anytime they’re unhappy and with adults, hopefully, we develop more emotional mastery so we don’t just start crying and… every time something bad happens. We don’t get sad and depressed every time something bad happens. Instead we’re whew. We take a deep breath. We control our emotions. We look at the situation more calmly and we make a decision and we move forward. That’s what we do as adults.

Now, I still struggle with this. I’m 49 and yes, still sometimes bad things happen and ah, I want to just complain and…and I’ll do it for a little while and then I’ll stop myself and realize hey, this is childish, enough of this. Time to make a decision and do something different. I did that this winter a little bit. I was depressed. Depressed and I was getting kind of fat and I finally just said hey, enough of this. This is childish. I’m acting like a child. No, I’m an adult man. Time to make a change and I started going to a strict exercise program. I changed the way I was eating. I’ve lost about 10 pounds of fat, five kilograms of fat, which is great.

Added a little bit of muscle. Feeling a lot stronger, have a lot more energy. This is the advantage of being an adult because when you’re an adult, you take control of your own life. You’re the master of your own life.

Then you get a feeling of power. You get a feeling of power that comes back to your life. Not power over other people. Not power to control other people. No, power to control yourself. True power is self-control, right? In the media and what we see is we see crazy people and all these terrible leaders and political people.

They’re always trying to control other people. That that’s power but not really. For me, I don’t want that kind of power. I don’t want it. True power is no, you can control yourself. You are the master of your own life. That’s what true power. I think most people that’s the power they want. Most people don’t want control over other people. Most people don’t care about becoming a billionaire but I think most people do want to have a feeling of control over their own life. Self-mastery, self-control. That’s what being an adult is about and even if you are 14 years old, you can do that. You can do that.

Stop complaining. Stop crying my parents, the schools. Just like me this winter, I understand you’re unhappy but just say okay, enough of this. Control your emotions. Every day fight to control your emotions. You’ll get stronger and stronger. You’ll get better and better at it and just start making decisions about your life and doing things, taking strong actions, moving forward. Learning and moving forward constantly, being decisive and you will start to get that feeling of self-control, of power over your own life and that’s when you will start to feel like a man instead of a boy. A woman instead of a girl.

Okay, then, so education. The foundation of education - social skills. Those three levels of social skills will help you personally achieve a high level of success in all parts of life and will help your children achieve the highest levels of success in life.

Those social skills are so important. You must consciously learn them. You must consciously teach them, practice them, master them. I teach them a lot in my VIP program. I teach leadership skills, self-mastery skills. Join my VIP program at EffortlessEnglishClub.com. EffortlessEnglishClub.com.