Just what exactly are these "21st century skills" that people keep talking about?
The editors of American School Board Journal attempt to provide some answers in this September’s issue. And I think, for the most part, they provide a fair answer to the question.
But I’m not entirely satisfied.
I was asked to write about the role of technology in the effort to prepare America’s youth for the future. In the end, however, my conclusion was modest: Today’s students need to know basic skills—reading, writing, math, science, history, etc.—and then they need to be taught how to think, solve problems, and work well with others.
The world is changing—and students do need more exposure to technology.
But I can’t shake the feeling that educators and policymakers are making too big a fuss over the details—those nuanced changes—needed to prepare students for the 21st century. The bottom line is that a good education is a good education. The graduate of an excellent school in 1840—one who was taught to think by his teachers—would likely do well in 2040.
Indeed, given how many of today’s students are falling short academically, I’d like to see every American student get what passed for a good education two centuries ago.
That’ll do plenty to make us globally competitive in the 21st century.
Del Stover, Senior Editor
Comments (1)
You say "students need to know basic skills—reading, writing, math, science, history, etc.—and then they need to be taught how to think, solve problems, and work well with others."
I think you have it exactly backwards. Students in the 21st century will most need to know how to think, then how to work well with others, and lastly about subject matter. This is because technology will handle most of the subject matter, such as spreadsheets doing the math, and will provide overwhelming information and backgound on issues as they arise.
Students need primarily to know how to differentiate between nonsense and knowledge. They need most of all to know what constitutes evidence and fact and how to reason from them.
Subject matter provides a means of giving examples for how this process of thinking works in the real world, and often subject matter requires specific forms of logical thought. But too often we teach rote subject matter that is more pedantry than useful knowledge precisely because it is divorced from knowing how to think.
Subject matter is important, but subjects are like medicines to a doctor. What the doctor really needs to know is how to recognize the evidence of disease and reason about the causes and implications of the disease, then the medicines become involved, but you can look those up and in the modern world of rapidly changing technology the doctor is far better off looking up the proper treatment once the evidence based diagnosis is made.
Teach how to think first, how to get along with others second, subject matter, at best, third.