Does giving a kid an iPod mean you are teaching “21st century skills?”
A Chapel Hill, North Carolina middle school may become the first in the country to give an iPod to every teacher and student, “an experiment that would challenge teachers and administrators to ensure the hand-held devices are used as learning tools, not toys,” reports the News & Observer. The school’s principal defends the iPod plan with a phrase that is rapidly becoming an education cliche: “[Our teachers] state their commitment to teach 21st-century skills, because technology is the future for students and teachers.”
Reporter Matt Dees injects a healthy note of skepticism in his piece, noting “it’s still not clear how the iPod Touches would be used at Culbreth Middle School. And school officials know that students may use the iPod Touches more to download the new Jonas Brothers single than to tap the riches of human knowledge.” Dees quotes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, who comments, “There has been a tendency to use technology as a substitute for curriculum.”
Technique and how-to ideas have taken the place of deciding what it is, exactly, we want these children to learn, says Hirsch. But I have nothing against the technology if it’s in the service of grown-ups facing their responsibilities to decide what the students need to know precisely. If they did that, these technical gadgets will be valuable.
I’ve been hearing the phrase a lot, so I ask the question in earnest: What exactly does it mean to ”teach 21st century skills”? Is learning to play an instrument a 21st century skill because you use an iPod? Is writing a research paper a 21st century skill just because you use Google? I’m hard-pressed to think of a single use of the phrase that didn’t conflate the tool and the task.
In a New York Times piece last week, Steve Lohr noted the technology is starting to “turn the corner” in schools, and offered an example of how it can transform learning. “The emphasis can shift to project-based learning, a real break with the textbook-and-lecture model of education. In a high school class, a project might begin with a hypothetical letter from the White House that says oil prices are spiking, the economy is faltering and the president’s poll numbers are falling. The assignment would be to devise a new energy policy in two weeks,” Lohr wrote. But as Joanne Jacobs noted, there’s nothing new about project learning. I would add that neither is working collaboratively intrinsically “21st century.”
Critical thinking? Problem solving? As old as banging rocks together to make fire. Working collaboratively? You mean, like hunting in groups to bring down a antelope? I’m no Luddite, and I’m all for using technology in the service of learning. But what are these uniquely “21st century skills?” Are there any?
There are two “21st century skills” that come readily to mind. One is learning how to sift intelligently through the vast amounts of information of varying quality that Google puts at your finger tips (and that electronic marketing puts in your in-box). The other is to learn to navigate gracefully issues related social networking and the issues of communicating with a medium where the lines between “private” and “public” are so blurry.
I’m not sure that giving middle schoolers iTouch’s helps with either of those, but I do think that high schools, and perhaps middle schools, want to give students consistent access to computers. I’d say that having the library and computers available after school hours to students who didn’t have computers at home was more important than giving students their own laptop or iTouch.
Lohr wrote: “In a high school class, a project might begin with a hypothetical letter from the White House that says oil prices are spiking, the economy is faltering and the president’s poll numbers are falling. The assignment would be to devise a new energy policy in two weeks.”
Now, how many high school students have the know-how to devise a new energy policy at all, let alone in two weeks?
That’s an irritating feature of the “project method”–that students are expected to tackle “Big Questions” that they are in no position to handle. And often the teacher isn’t prepared to handle such questions, either, nor, in the minds of many educators, is that a concern.
In “The Fantasia of Current Education” (1941; published in Forgotten Heroes in American Education, ed. J. Wesley Null and Diane Ravitch, 2006), Isaac Leon Kandel discusses the “cult of superficiality” among progressives: the contempt for subject matter and the insistence that students tackle “big” questions without adequate preparation. To illustrate such thinking, he cites several sources, including a 1939 article published in School and Society:
“A teacher does not need to have studied economics in order to give a good course in the subject. All that is needed is a teacher (1) who is alert to the problems of the day; (2) who is openminded; (3) who can stimulate pupils to bring economic problems to class for discussion; (4) who permits and encourages free and open discussion of all controversial subjects; (5) who instills into the pupils a spirit of tolerance for all views and a respect for the opinions of others, and (6) who shows in all discussion that he or she has at heart the solution of the economic ills of the day in a way which will restore prosperity and happiness to the whole people.”
Pretty similar to the 21st-century skills of today, only today we’ve got the technology to deliver the ignorant bliss with much greater speed.
Yes, there is nothing new about critical thinking, problem-solving and many other skills featured in the “21st-century” agenda. It’s a fair bet that Newton, Douglass, Roebling and Mme. Curie possessed those skills.
Yet the need to instill these skills in many more students is new.
As long as commentators on 21st century skills suggest that such skills are at war with knowledge, we won’t have a very productive discussion.
Claus,
To which “commentators” are you referring? I think many of us would argue that such skills (21st century, ancient, or in between) absolutely depend on knowledge. At war with knowledge? By no means.
Nor is “the need to instill these skills in many more students” new. Universal public schooling brought a dramatic increase in the student body, as did various immigration waves.
Newness does exist–but often the word “new” is used for promotional purposes. When the Soviets abandoned the project method and returned to the traditional curriculum, they referred to the latter in terms of a “revolution” and “new methods.” (See William C. Bagley, Education and Emergent Man (1934), pp. 180-182).
To distinguish the new from the not-so-new, one needs a combination of knowledge, critical thinking, and perseverance. It is one of the most demanding projects a person can undertake. I am a beginner at it.
I can actually second much of Claus’ post. There is an unfortunate tendency among some otherwise well-intentioned people to suggest content knowledge is secondary in importance to critical thinking. problem solving, etc. They are not at war, but two sides of the same coin.
Yes. Maybe I misunderstood Claus’s post. It wasn’t clear to me which commentators he had in mind: the proponents of “21st century skills,” those skeptical over the term, or both.
What would you recommend for a governor (videos, perhaps?) who has been conned by the anti-knowledge sect of the 21st century skills movement?
Looks to me like 21st century skills are being (deliberately but needlessly) juxtaposed against knowledge which can be measured under NCLB. Hence, “21st century skills” as a marketing tool of the anti-accountability lobby.