Life skills education (LSE) refers to a kind of psycho-educational intervention for children and youth that has become popular since the 1990s. While it may take many forms (i.e., stand alone, integrated, extracurricular and blended), LSE curricula aims at teaching young people a set of personal, cognitive, interpersonal, social and affective skills to become resilient to everyday stressors and stay on a positive trajectory of growth (UNICEF, 2005). The World Health Organization (WHO, 1993) defines LSE as “the psychosocial abilities for positive and adaptive behaviours that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life” (p.1). Explaining these demands and challenges resulting from a number of factors, such as growing up, puberty, making friends and passing exams, and also identifying structural conditions such as poverty as a cause, the WHO has noted that all of these have contributed to an increased mental health burden amongst young people (WHO, 2009). Thus, it has recommended a set of ten skills to be taught to young people to empower them to manage these conditions and become resilient, such as self-esteem, interpersonal and communication skills, emotional management, problem solving and critical thinking skills and empathy. Through a range of advocacy efforts, consisting of United Nations’ organizations, as well as other international organizations, international frameworks such as Education for All (EFA), national curricular frameworks, as well as by industry, philanthropies and non-governmental organizations, LSE is now globally accepted as an important component of education. 

While teaching psychological self-regulation, what differentiates LSE from other forms of psychological interventions is the emphasis on skill development: that is, tacit, psychological behaviours and aspects of the self, such as self-esteem and confidence, or cognitive processes such as thinking have been reconceptualized as a set of observable, repeatable and practice-able skills that can be formally acquired or learnt through experiential pedagogies. Despite the euphemistic label of ‘skills’ (which signals ‘how to do’ knowledge), what LSE encodes are internal aspects of the self (such as emotions, attitudes or beliefs) which are sought to be reworked through experiential pedagogies that visibilize these aspects of the self (Maithreyi, 2021). Once visibilized, expectations are set upon young people to work upon themselves, thus, emphasizing a rationalist approach (Arur & Dejaeghere, 2019) to developmental problems, which overlook the structural contexts of poverty, unemployment, marginalization, gendered inequalities, and violence, that significantly contribute to poor mental health, and result in anxiety, depression, suicide, and poor quality of life. With genealogical roots of LSE stemming from modern psychology that is heavily influenced by rationalism and individualism, LSE interventions adopt an individualized understanding of empowerment and resilience (Hermans, Kempen & van Loon, 1992). Thus, they represent forms of affective labour (Desai, 2019) that young people must undertake in order to positively manage their everyday challenges and risks. As depoliticized forms of learning that do not engage with deeper aspects of identity, agency, empowerment and resilience, many LSE programmes are marketed as value neutral, generic and transferable across contexts, thus remaining acceptable to governments, donors and powerful stakeholders in the community (Boler & Aggleton, 2004). In reality, however, LSE programmes emphasize certain specific ways of being and behaving that are more amenable to those in power, such as bourgeoisie communication styles and rational choices that fit a liberal, market-based economy.

Interestingly, however, in the Indian context, imported into schools that otherwise practice didactic modes of teaching and learning, despite several curricular reforms, LSE programmes are largely put to use to ‘discipline’ children and achieve the school’s objectives of improving attendance and improvements in educational outcomes (Maithreyi, 2021). Poor infrastructural and pedagogical quality of schools are expected to be compensated by LSE programmes that are supposed to train children to become more disciplined, punctual and studious. Further, critical research on LSE in India also shows how in the translation of LSE programmes within schools, patriarchal and normative expectations, salient to the caste-ordered, and gendered cultural context of society, are reinscribed (Arur & DeJaeghere, 2018; Maithreyi, 2021). Observing a similar trend with non-school based LSE programmes for marginalized young women, Karishma Desai (2020) points to how LSE training programmes become sites for the cultivation of feminised labour for the global neoliberal economy.

However, students engage with these programmes flexibly adopting knowledge (e.g., specific skills such as art or sport, jargon or factual knowledge that may help them negotiate better jobs or status), while not completely remaking themselves as expected by various authorities (e.g., schools or the LSE programme experts or trainers) (Maithreyi, 2021). Other works in the Indian context, such as Arur and Sharma’s (2022) discussion of ‘informational literacy’ to make critical career decisions as life skills, also demonstrates how youth flexibly engage with forms of knowledge that seek to guide them onto positive developmental pathways. Thus, these various critical studies on LSE in the Indian context also throw light on the negotiated identities that are produced by youth, within these training sites, while some others also present the pedagogic possibilities for LSE programmes to develop a critical consciousness in youth, and empower them through a socially relevant curricula (Maithreyi et. al., 2022).