I’ve changed the first sentence as you suggest, however see my other blog on skills.

If skills are entirely subject specific as you seem to be arguing, why is it that someone with a good higher education is often better at reading a text unrelated to their specialism, than someone only educated up to the age of 16? Take for example reading a complex newspaper article.

I think some skills are more transferrable than others. Reading comprehension has a good degree of transferability, but of course no where near complete transferability. You will always be able to understand something better when it is within a subject you have specialised in as you point out. However I can read and understand articles on US politics, but have never studied it formally.

My main point is, that for a given level of background knowledge, you will nearly always understand something better if you read it twice than if you read it once. You will almost always understand it better if you isolate the difficult passages and give them more attention. This is why it is fair to call reading comprehension a generic skill, even if you are better at reading in your specialism than you are outside it.

I don’t approve of all attempts to teach such generic skills, for example the vague notion that just doing a creative tasks will make you necessarily more creative. The generic skill needs to be taught explicitly within a domain, on a particular task, and then the teacher needs to teach for transfer. This is hard to achieve I grant you. but that doesn’t mean its impossible to achieve.

I’d be obliged if you could add the word ‘generic’ before skills in the first sentence of your blog as that’s what was being criticised & not subject specific skills 🙂 which you do mention at the end of your post.

The notion the procedural skills cannot be taught is false see

Teaching Procedural Skills

Thomas E Norris, MD,1 Sam W Cullison, MD,1 and Stephan D Fihn, MD, MPH2

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1497230/

They must be taught explicitly using different modalities – i.e the five senses and then repeatedly practiced in order to appear ‘unconsciousness’
The structure of knowledge is itself a domain i.e epistemology and therefore I tried applying your flowchart to a chemistry text, computer programming and maths textbooks – I can give examples if you wish and it rapidly fails because it is generic

There are better alternatives but they are all domain specific eg

Learning Domain Knowledge for Teaching Procedural Skills

ict.usc.edu/…/Learning%20Domain%20Knowledge%20for%20Teaching%20Procedu…

That paper has a model like you flowchart for machine learning but it does not transfer

For science at any level & maths at degree level (for maths replace ‘hypothesis’ with ‘proposition’ & ‘experiment’ with ‘proof’) your flowchart does not work

To understand a science textbook at any level a simple flowchart of the scientific methods such as

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*C1v45TudscADxBfZxvB7_g.png

is needed – I can tweet the links to you separately if you wish to check the pics
eg Observation–>Darwins finches Beaks–>Hypothesis ‘the type of food determines the design of the body and behaviour of the animal’ & ‘hypothesis of natural selection & some more hypotheses’ –>verifed using experimental observations leads to the theory of Evolution

[Your flow chart can’t work for Science and Maths as it is not domain specific because it does not emphasise the need to build a network of experimentally verified hypotheses of which the student must know the experiments & evidence that proved them to build the relevant theory]

It also does not work for Geography or History as those subjects try and use the scientific method by replacing ‘experiments’ with ‘case studies’ in Geography and using paired ‘historical examples’ in History
So in summary we can & must teach explicitly procedures for learning that apply to different subjects as in the 1st part of your blog post but these do not transfer to other domains eg science to music

So learning the scientific method does not make you better at playing or composing music but it may help you design better musical instruments

There is no experimental evidence that generic thinking skills eg Blooms / SOLO (or any other pseudoscientific taxonomy) can be taught or that doing lots of them makes a person better at them in general – doing lots of scientific analysis does not make a person better at analysing poetry as it’s a different procedure nor does does it make them quicker at learning how to analyse poetry

🙂