The Industrial Revolution and Christmas
“But you’ve always been good at business, Jacob,” said Scrooge, pausing, and he was now beginning to apply all this to himself.
“Work?!” cried the Spirit, wringing his hands.
“The human race was my job. The common good was my job. Mercy, almsgiving, indulgence and benevolence, all this was my work!”
A Christmas Story by Charles Dickens
Soft skills, although we use them as a common phrase in the business world, are not a new phenomenon. As we see in one of the greatest novels of its time, they were recognized even in the time of Charles Dickens, when the world was undergoing significant changes.
Harsh industrial realities ruled Victorian England. The Industrial Revolution, rapid changes in the labor market, population migration, and the economic crisis created a turbulent epoch. In the 19th century, child labor and its abuse were commonplace. Parliamentary Report of 1843. In England, in which investigators and journalists published interviews with children from poor families, he also reached Dickens. Many of them, as young as eight years old, were tasked with pushing a coal cart during their regular 11-hour work hours. In interviews, they spoke about it extremely realistically.
The report did not show exceptions, but a steady, regular occurrence in British society of its time. It struck Dickens so much that, in just six weeks, it inspired the creation of A Christmas Story, which went out of print by the end of that year. Very quickly it became a bestseller without which the New Year holidays and their popular culture in the Anglo-Saxon world can not be imagined. Almost two centuries later, not much has changed. Today in the Christmas story today we discover new values about ourselves and others, in accordance with the times in which we live.
Soft skills today
The modern theory of education distinguishes between cognitive skills and social and emotional skills. Relevant educational research shows that skills breed skills, that is, they accumulate them. Therefore, it is believed that investment in education, from the age of early development through lifelong learning, is certain to bring results, on a short-term and long-term basis. Social and emotional skills are gaining more and more attention today, both within the education system and later, during the development and career building.
They develop not only in school settings and traditional learning environments, but also in the family and the different communities to which the individual belongs. All those extracurricular activities, designed within the system, which are part of the national curriculum, but also which are outside it and outside the school, contribute to the development of soft skills.
While cognitive, i.e. the so-called “Hard” skills, easily measurable by academic grades, various tests and examinations, social and emotional skills cannot be measured in such a transparent way. They must be measured within cultural and linguistic boundaries, bearing in mind their peculiarities and context.
When we talk about communication skills, emotional intelligence, empathy, self-confidence, teamwork, in Victorian England, they meant benevolence, kindness, generosity, compassion, self-control – values that Dickens espoused in his story about the holiday spirit. The holidays served Dickens only as a starting point for an allegory about philanthropy and the common good. The Christmas Story is therefore one of the greatest lessons on management, corporate management and soft skills that can be found in world literature, and it is certainly the first such lesson, which we encounter already in working youth.
The first guide to soft skills
Watershed socio-historical moments are often the trigger for the creation of the most monumental works of art and great human decisions. Although child labor in Western civilization is a distant past, the message this story sends us about it is so powerful that it resonates with 21st-century audiences just as loudly. It reminds a new generation of readers that value is not found in academic knowledge, profits, and success per se, but in how we get to them and how we apply them.
The essence of what we call soft skills lies precisely in these subtleties – in the way we manage my emotions, how we communicate and how we relate to others. How we work in a team, how we treat our employees, what corporate values we represent, whether we have a good relationship with colleagues, these are all indicators of the development of our soft skills. Dickens’ novel is therefore not only a reminder of philanthropy and the common good, nor a mere romanticized depiction of historical circumstances, but above all a guide to the development of skills that are necessary in the modern (business) world.
