Gerald Bracey asks 3 questions that might interest education technology bloggers.
The first two:
The immediate questions that come to mind — or certainly should come to mind — are “What constitutes a 21st century skill?” and then “Who gets to define such a skill?” The answer to the first question is “nobody knows” and the answer to the second question is “The Partnership for 21st Century Skills.” Futurist Ed Barlow told the Industrial Asset Management Council in October, 2007 that 80% of the jobs our current kindergartners will hold as adults don’t exist yet. This, I submit, makes it a bit complicated to prepare the kids for them. You would think Barrett and the others would see this: Barlow also said that 90% of Intel’s products at the end of a year didn’t exist at the start of that year.
Among the skills listed by the Partnership are “Ethics and Social Responsibility.” Excuse me? These are areas only now emerging as cogent to the 21st century? “Self-direction?” Yoo-hoo, David Riesman pointed to this in 1950 — The Lonely Crowd. “Critical Thinking” and “Problem Solving” also number among the 21st century skills. I suppose it is boorish to point out that without further context and elaboration, both of these terms are wholly meaningless. Back in the 1960′s some psychologists announced that they wished to produce “content free problem solvers.” That goal is now viewed as absurd. Problem solving always occurs around some content and people who are superb at writing software to solve some statistical problem might be awful at dealing with human beings in an organizational setting (see, Jobs, Gates, and Barrett, above). It might be important to think outside the box, but the contours of the box differ hugely from situation to situation. Jaime Escalante, the inspiration for “Stand and Deliver,” was unable to reproduce his L. A. success when he moved to Sacramento, in large part it appears, because the situations were so different.
He closes with:
All this begs a larger question: Is job preparation what schools should be about?
We’ll need to talk about that last one.
6 Comments
I liked this comment on 21st C skills by Nichthus here (scroll down to 21st C section):
“Web 2.0 has hit us at a rather interesting point of society’s philosophical development. We are awash in postmodern nonsense. Let’s get a little more modernistic… but, of course, let’s not go all the way back! By all means let’s embed critical thinking and problem solving into the curriculum, but let’s try not to do so at the expense of valuable foundational skills. And, while we’re at it, let’s not get too nonsensical about being ‘student-centred’ and afraid of becoming irrelevant. There is too much fear about these conversations, fear of being ‘too modernistic’, ‘out of touch’, ‘didactic’, ‘traditionalist’, ‘Web 1.0′, ‘Luddite’… my fear is that we become so open that our common sense and responsibility fall out and land with a squish. We are, at the end of the day, about education and learning.”
One of my concerns is that if we work only toward what will benefit us materially, who determines what we become?
Most of my teaching is done with books, pencils, paper, and bits of stuff pulled from the closet. I feel no impulse to ignore any of these things because they are still the most common and basic thinking tools I know of.
So, can’t we decide on those concepts that prolly won’t change and teach those. I figure that problems will still need to be solved and groups of people will still form up somehow to solve those problems. or how about put the learner incharge of the decision and at least they will learn autonomous, ‘life long learning’ skills.
I think the real stickiness comes from the fact, IMHO, that classrooms haven’t changed at all in the past 50 years so why change now. They don’t react to changing conditions and see these test scores show we are doing just fine!, they say. Also, when have they really put the learner in the center – and not of the discussion, but the center of the organization. Mostly, it’s for the ‘material benefit’ of our society or our benevolent overlords who need ‘skilled’ workers who are dis-integrated, unquestioning, without insight nor curiosity. This isn’t a radical idea – read ‘Harrison Bergeron’ http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html . We have been trained from the beginning to be accepting and un critical. That’s got to stop or we are at the mercy of whatever tyrant happens to show up…
grrrr
/takes off ‘poopy pants’ and gets back to work
PS: As always, Mr Noon, you are always on my read list. Sometimes, I get too busy to read, but it’s always a delight when I return. Keep on truckin’
Newman, you’re right. It isn’t a radical idea. Or maybe we could say that it’s always been a radical idea that hasn’t been fully explored. In any case, it’s been kicked around for over a hundred years. Thanks for the Vonnegut link. Good to hear from you.
I guess I am always stumped by the phrase, “Our kids will hold jobs which don’t yet exist.” Is this really new? And, so what? regardless of the technology, folks will always need to know how to read, write, compute, create and THINK.
…and THINK – a 21st century skill that is sorely needed. Yes.
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