Dan Willingham’s latest is up at the Britannica Blog, and it’s a keeper. The UVA cognitive scientist and Core Knowledge trustee looks at several recent reports on “21st Century Skills” including creativity, critical thinking, global awareness, and information literacy, and asks “Where’s the beef?”
21st-century skills require deep understanding of subject matter, a fact that these reports acknowledge, albeit briefly. As I have emphasized elsewhere, gaining a deep understanding is, not surprisingly, hard. Shallow understanding requires knowing some facts. Deep understanding requires knowing the facts AND knowing how they fit together, seeing the whole. It’s simply harder. And skills like “analysis” and “critical thinking” are tied to content; you analyze history differently than you analyze literature, a point I’ve emphasized here. If you don’t think that most of our students are gaining very deep knowledge of core subjects—and you shouldn’t—then there is not much point in calling for more emphasis on analysis and critical thinking unless you take the content problem seriously. You can’t have one without the other.
Calls to focus on 21st-century skills, Willingham concludes, evoke a familiar pattern: pendulum swings between an emphasis on process (analysis, critical thinking, cooperative learning) followed by a back-to-basics movement that emphasizes content. “In calmer moments,” Willingham writes, “everyone agrees that students must have both content knowledge and practice in using it, but one or the other tends to get lost as the emphasis sweeps to the other extreme.”
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