Add the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews to the growing number of observers skeptical of ”21st century skills,” which he pronounces the latest doomed pedagogical fad.
It calls for students to learn to think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece. But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?
Mathews is especially tough on the rhetoric of 21st century skills enthusiasts who insist, as one advocacy group does, that every aspect of our education system must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st century skills they need to compete. “This is the all-at-once syndrome,” Mathews observes, “a common failing of reform movements.”
Like many fads, 21st century skills has legs because it sounds so reasonable, especially to non-educators. Children should be able to solve problems, and think critically. For teachers, the fad has the potential to send the message that such skills are content-neutral, or can be taught in the abstract, which is demonstrably false. As has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere, you can’t uncouple higher order thinking from the deep subject-specific knowledge that makes it possible.
“It takes hard work to teach this stuff, and even harder work, by poorly motivated adolescents, to learn it,” Mathews concludes. “In our poorest neighborhoods, we still have some of our weakest teachers, either too inexperienced to handle methods like modeling instruction or too cynical to consider 21st-century skills anything more than another doomed fad. There might be a way to turn them around, but if there isn’t, instead of engaged and inspired students, we will have just one more big waste of time.”
I think 21st century skills is quickly morphing into a meaningless buzzword — 21st century skills are whatever skills the writer thinks are important.
There one grain of truth that I think is buried in the idea, and that’s that fewer and fewer people are going to be able to build a life around a single skill learned in their late teens and early 20’s.
In many ways “21st century skills” are the skills of the professional worker rather than the assembly line worker. It’s not that they haven’t been taught to many students before, it’s that we haven’t been successful at teaching them to all students (or even most students) and that is (potentially) becoming an increasing problem for both students and their future employers.
But acting like these are skills no one’s ever needed before is silly.