Objective: To outline a core set of pre vocational skills and suggest methods for instilling them in blind children

• Even in the most directed of environments, like formal education, the requirements of teacher to child are largely negotiable: The child is expected to complete given tasks, but the rate of progress may not be uniform and her compliance may be variable. The nature of pre vocational skills is to transform all aspects of performance into non-negotiable outputs.
• Time. In any vocational setting, the most important element of task completion is time. Whether an employee is involved in manual piece work or operating on an assembly line, the inter-dependence in the division of labor and the absolute dependence in autonomous production is the fixed time for task completion.
• Routine. Many labor tasks are repetitive and therefore must be completed in the appropriate time without a lapse of concentration.
• Self-criticism. People must learn to assess whether their completed task meets expected quality, that is, whether it conforms to the end requirement.
• Initiative. In spite of the above, many tasks require initiative, usually a choice of alternatives; most contemporary vocational skills involve choosing between variants of a theme where there are better and worse choices.
• Fairness. Whereas the child/teacher relationship is (even if it should not be) “top/down,” the vocational relationship should be based on fairness, where the employee has an understanding of an agreement and when it is being applied unfairly.
• Criticism. Converse to fairness is the concept of just criticism, which should be given and accepted constructively.
• Many of a blind child’s sighted peers will imitate adult pre-vocational and vocational skills, but a blind child must learn these. This happens best with peers in “playing shop” or assembling models from components, and then holding team meetings to assess outcomes.
• It is as important to highlight conformance and success as shortcomings and areas which require improvement.