You might think that as members of the public speaking industry, we’d be in favor of event planning being taught in schools. There’s no denying that it’s a useful skill, especially in this day and age.
But should It be taught in schools? Well, that’s the big question, and it’s what we’re going to tackle today. We’ll start by taking a look at a few of the arguments both for and against it and then we’ll see if we can come up with a definitive answer.
And so if you’re ready, let’s go ahead and get started.
Event planning is a practical skill that can be used across a whole range of industries. It’ll come in handy for everyone, from bar managers to marketers and musicians. You’d be hard-pressed to find an industry that doesn’t use events in some form or another, although some use them more than others do.
If nothing else, event planning skills look great on your resume and can make the difference between getting hired or being passed over for another candidate.
When we talk about event planning as a subject in school, we usually focus on how it will help kids boost their planning skills. What we rarely mention is that it’s also a great way to learn time management.
Kids can be super creative, but they’re rarely good at keeping an eye on the clock and making sure that their projects are completed on time. When you’re running an event, you have no choice. You set the date and that’s that—everything has to revolve around that.
Event planning pushes students to work as a team in a more exciting way than the usual group projects that force them to give a presentation about some topic they don’t care about.
Instead, they’ll work as a team to plan and execute an event that they can all be proud of. It gives them a more tangible reason to work together and will seem as though it’s a task with a purpose when other team projects might not tick all of those boxes.
Like any project, successfully arranging an event as part of an event planning class could help increase students’ confidence. Events are difficult to arrange and can be quite stressful to handle, and there aren’t many greater feelings than those you can experience when you see attendees’ happy faces at an event you helped create.
Better still, because these events can be created in the relative safety of a school class, they’re more likely to be successful in the first place. There’s little to no risk of the events failing and undermining that burgeoning confidence.
Finally, we should note that event planning lessons can help foster the entrepreneurs among your students. It can act as a booster for them, providing them with a shortcut from the person they are now to the person that they want to be.
Entrepreneurs need to be able to plan events if they want to continue being entrepreneurs after they finish school. It’s one of those skills that will come in handy as time goes on.
The biggest argument against teaching event planning in schools is the fact that educational institutions only have a certain amount of time and resources available to them. If they’re to teach event planning, this could mean taking time and resources away from other subjects.
Given that schools are already struggling for teaching resources and many institutions are short-staffed, it’s easy to see why a lot of teachers are against the idea. Teaching public speaking might work well in an ideal world, but perhaps we need to be more practical.
Public speaking is a valuable skill that will serve most people well throughout their careers, but it may not be a good fit for everyone. If someone plans to spend their life working as a manual laborer, public speaking skills are going to be pretty low on the list of priorities.
And if public speaking skills aren’t going to be useful for everyone then perhaps it’s not a good idea to teach it. It might be better for our schools to focus on teaching whichever skills will be the most useful to the largest number of people.
There are plenty of qualified teachers for subjects like English and mathematics because those are common school subjects worldwide. Because of that, there’s plenty of training out there and the infrastructure is in place to support the available talent.
When we’re teaching public speaking, the situation is different. There are few qualified public speaking coaches, and the ones that we do have are already in high demand in the business world.
Coming back to the idea of whether our time might be better spent teaching other subjects, we need to consider that there are more suitable alternatives available. Sure, we could teach public speaking, but we could also teach everything from money management to personal branding.
With so many options and therefore so many alternatives available to us, our time could be better spent teaching something else. Again, it all comes down to your priorities and where you want to focus your energy.
As with every other industry, there’s a huge amount of change happening in the public speaking scene right now. A lot of that is because of COVID-19 and the way it forced a lot of public speakers to switch to speaking online via tools like Zoom.
Pandemics don’t come along every day (thank goodness!), but we can still be pretty sure that the insane pace of change that we’ve witnessed will continue. This means that even if we do teach event planning in schools, there’s a risk that the lessons we teach will be obsolete by the time the kids have graduated.
On balance, we’d have to say that event planning probably shouldn’t be taught in schools, at least in the form of mandatory lessons. If it is taught, it should be done as an elective that students can take if they’re interested in learning more about the art of public speaking.
But that’s just us, and now it’s time for us to hear from you. Do you think event planning should be taught in schools? And what are your arguments for or against it?
As always, be sure to let us know in the comments so that we can keep the discussion going. You can also follow us on your social networking sites of choice for more. We’ll see you soon for another article!
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