A Key towards Opening a School to Close a Prison: Education as a Life Skill

In this changing time of globalization, education should inevitably be considered an effective   process pertinent to real life; education and its organisms have gone through a phase of shift in this global age. Educational purposes and objectives, for instance, have witnessed change in teaching-learning methodologies, learning situations, purposeful thinking, and the employability of tools. For example, the status of an education in English, the language of success as many call it ,  nowadays provides  merit to redefine the role of both its teachers and learners internationally, from a mere lesson deliverer and direct instructor, into a skillful facilitator, mediator, guide, mentor and trainer who provides the learner with new-fangled skills and roles in life. In this respect, foreign languages and education should be delivered as life skills which help to develop  the EFL learner’s multidimensional skills, in aspects such as thinking  (creativity, imagination, problem solving, decision making, self-knowledge, critical thinking, assessing and analyzing information), learning  (agility and adaptability, receiving and giving feedback, handling criticism, innovation, exploration, learner autonomy), working  (communication, collaboration, cooperation), people management, time management, organization, negotiating, leading by influence) and socialization (citizenship, social responsibility, cultural awareness, social development, respecting diversity and networking). This paper aims at redefining and rethinking the aim behind opening schools; furthermore, it aims at exploring the multidimensional skills the school should provide to be applied in real situations (a particular focus will be on the Teacher Training School in Constantine, Algeria). Many questions can be raised and answered accordingly; the way that life skills can incorporate and be incorporated into the Algerian educational system, schools and classrooms for example, and the redefined role of both the teacher and the learner within schools in such situations; the tools used to meet the aforementioned aims. The papers assumption can be stated as follows: unless new methods, approaches and techniques are not applied, education and schools cannot meet their objectives and life competencies, and crucial skills cannot be achieved. Education within schools will not provide the positive alternative to prisons, and opened schools will not help closing prisons accordingly. Initial findings of the paper show that education and actors within schools and universities are urgently required to rethink and redefine their roles in this changing time. Thus, the pertinent recommendation from this study is to enhance the  methods of teaching, learning and pedagogy and push them forward towards helping the development of education and its mechanism in different schools  to develop  life skills in their pupils, instead of the skills of ‘crime, delinquency and outlaw’ found in prison.