CHAPTER 4 PERSONAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Definitions of Personal development:

• Personal development comprises activities that improve self-knowledge and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and enhance quality of life.
• Maintains an up to date personal development plan and takes action to ensure personal development takes place.
• Develops skills related to positive interpersonal relationships within the family, peer groups, workplace, and community.

Personal development refers to activities that improve self-knowledge and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and employability, enhance quality of life and realize dreams and aspirations. The concept covers a wider field than self-development or self-help; it also includes developing other people, and by extension refers to personal development methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems.

At whatever level of development economic, political, biological, organizational or personal a framework is needed in order to know whether improvement has actually occurred. For personal development the primary judge of improvement is oneself but validation requires assessment using standard criteria. Personal development frameworks consist of goals or benchmarks that define the end-point, strategies or plans for reaching goals, measurement and assessment of progress, levels or stages that define milestones along the development path, and a feedback-system to provide information on changes

Human beings are essentially social beings. In modern life, man has come to feel the necessity of human relationships more than ever before. Practically, no one can any longer live in a state of complete or even participation. It is by living in society that man comes to develop human qualities of which the social phase is the fundamental quality which he must develop for better adjustment in a civilized society. At the time of birth, the human child is unaware of the social phase, though he is born within a social group and is surrounded by those in whose case social development has already taken place or is under way. From merely a biological organism, the human child develops into a total individual in the context of social environment. As the child grows up, he develops not only in physical, mental, emotional and attitudinal behaviour, but also in his social behaviour. It is the acceptable social behaviour that makes him an acceptable social being.