Finishing School

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A finishing school is defined as "a private school for students that emphasizes training in all round personality development, cultural and social activities. Specific skill sets may be imparted as value addition. The name reflects that it follows a school or college education and is intended to complete the educational experience. It may consist of an intensive course, or a one-year program.

Personality Development

An individual's personality is an aggregate conglomeration of decisions we've made throughout our lives (Bradshaw). There are inherent natural, genetic, and environmental factors that contribute to the development of our personality. According to process of socialization, "personality also colors our values, beliefs, and expectations ... Hereditary factors that contribute to personality development do so as a result of interactions with the particular social environment in which people live."

There are several personality types as Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers illustrated in several personalities typology tests. These tests only provide enlightenment based on the preliminary insight scored according to the answers judged by the parameters of the test. Other theories on personality development are Jean Piaget stages of development, and personality development in Sigmund Freud's theory being formed through the interaction of id, ego, and super-ego.

Technical Skills

A skill is the learned capacity to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self motivation and others, whereas domain-specific skills would be useful only for a certain job. Skill usually requires certain environmental stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown and used.

People need a broad range of skills in order to contribute to a modern economy and take their place in the technological society of the twenty-first century. The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), a non-profit association for workplace learning and performance professionals study showed that through technology, the workplace is changing, and so are the skills that employees must have to be able to change with it. The study identified 16 basic skills that the workplace of the future would need in the employee of the future.

The skills involved can be defined by the organization concerned, or by third party institutions. They are usually defined in terms of a skills framework, also known as a competency framework or skills matrix. This consists of a list of skills, and a grading system, with a definition of what it means to be at particular level for a given skill. To be most useful, skills management needs to be conducted as an ongoing process, with individuals assessing and updating their recorded skill sets regularly. These updates should occur at least as frequently as employees' regular line manager reviews, and certainly when their skill sets have changed.


Moral Education

Morality (from the Latin moralities "manner, character, proper behavior") is a system of conduct and ethics that is virtuous. Morality has three principal meanings.

In its "descriptive" sense, morality refers to personal or cultural values, codes of conduct or social mores that distinguish between right and wrong in the human society. Describing morality in this way is not making a claim about what is objectively right or wrong, but only referring to what is considered right or wrong by people. For the most part right and wrong acts are classified as such because they are thought to cause benefit or harm, but it is possible that many moral beliefs are based on prejudice, ignorance or even hatred. This sense of term is also addressed by descriptive ethics.

In its "normative" sense, morality refers directly to what is right and wrong, regardless of what people think. It could be defined as the conduct of the ideal "moral" person in a certain situation. This usage of the term is characterized by "definitive" statements such as "That act is immoral" rather than descriptive ones such as "Many believe that act is immoral." It is often challenged by a moral skepticism, in which the unchanging existence of a rigid, universal, objective moral "truth" is rejected, and supported by moral realism, in which the existence of this "truth" is accepted. The normative usage of the term "morality" is also addressed by normative ethics.

Morality may also be defined as synonymous with ethics, the field that encompasses the above two meanings and others within a systematic philosophical study of the moral domain. Ethics seeks to address questions such as how a moral outcome can be achieved in a specific situation (applied ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), what morals people actually abide by (descriptive ethics), what the fundamental nature of ethics or morality is, including whether it has any objective justification (meta-ethics), and how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is (moral psychology).

A key issue is the meaning of the terms "moral" or "immoral". Moral realism would hold that there are true moral statements which report objective moral facts, whereas moral anti-realism would hold that morality is derived from any one of the norms prevalent in society (cultural relativism); the edicts of a god (divine command theory); is merely an expression of the speakers' sentiments (emotivism); an implied imperative (universal prescriptivism); or falsely presupposes that there are objective moral facts (error theory). Some thinkers hold that there is no correct definition of right behavior, that morality can only be judged with respect to particular situations, within the standards of particular belief systems and socio-historical contexts. This position, known as moral relativism, often cites empirical evidence from anthropology as evidence to support its claims. The opposite view, that there are universal, eternal moral truths are known as moral universalism. Moral universalists might concede that forces of social conformity significantly shape moral decisions, but deny that cultural norms and customs define morally right behavior.

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