Educating the Total Child Using the Tokkatsu Model

Today, increasingly, the need to develop social skills, emotional stability, collaboration, critical thinking, and the like in children has jumped to the forefront of educational reform, alongside traditional subject mastery. Various reasons are cited. It is said that noncognitive skills, not just cognitive (subject) skills, are important for both achievement and labor-market outcomes, and that the “evidence suggests that the labor-market payoffs to noncognitive skills have been increasing over time and the payoffs are particularly strong for individuals who possess both cognitive and non-cognitive skills” (Schanzenbach et al., 2016, p. i). Noncognitive skills, such as social and emotional learning (SEL), are increasingly described as crucial for future success in multiple fields, not just work. This leads to the assertion that “since noncognitive skills matter greatly and can be nurtured in schools, developing them should be an explicit goal of public education” and the overemphasis on cognitive not only impedes noncognitive development but “is also counterproductive” in developing cognitive skills since the two are interrelated (Garcia, 2014, p. 4). Such studies only strengthen the increasing awareness of the importance of developing skills which are not restricted to a narrow definition of subject mastery.