I agree, we should be asking questions like, "Communication skills for what?" That's a problem with a one-size-fits-all curriculum. What are preparing them for?

At least with a u-choose program, the learners could explore different avenues for these processes, because most of the jobs that our children will be doing in 10 years don't even exist today. They need to have opportunities in school that are not limited by the curriculum developers' imaginations.

I agree with you that the activities need to be anchored in some kind of context. By allowing learners to choose their context, we can help to keep them motivated. The content, for all intents and purposes, doesn't really matter, because it will probably be obsolete by the time they graduate (how useful is your high school diploma?).

I don't think that we can use a training strategy for general education, because we don't know what we're training them for. We can just provide lots of opportunities for practise in different contexts (grist for the cognitive mill).