I have a few more favorites:

The ability to bear disappointment and hardship with grace (equanimity)

Tbe recognition of one’s own weaknesses (humility)

The ability to rejoice and suffer with others (empathy)

The ability to stay true to one’s principles and nature (integrity)

In high school I took a course on history and philosophy of religion. We kept coming back to the same idea: that even when the world breaks down and seems to lose its meaning, each person has a choice: to maintain dignity and hope or to abandon them. We saw this choice reflected in the epic of Gilgamesh and in the writings of Elie Wiesel. We understood that we could affirm meaning in our lives (or not), no matter what happened to us, be it trivial or devastating.

I don’t think that idea is lost today. But the subject doesn’t seem to come up very often. There is such obsession with external success that young people (and people of all ages) rarely take the opportunity to look at their fundamental choices.

Success is a fine thing. But we have to ask: Success at what? There are many kinds, and much of it may hinge on how we treat each others and do the things we love. It may require that we make good choices, not good guesses.

A list like this reminds me that we can still do this, at any time.

At the start of the twentieth century if you wanted music you had to make it yourself. So people did. And so they took music instruction seriously. At the end of the twentieth century the situation was quite different. You could have music no matter how musically ignorant or untalented you were. In the twenty-first century that will be even more so. So, superficially at least, it might be argued that we don’t need to teach music any more. But I think that is very superficial. I agree with Julie that piano playing, and music in general, is a most valuable nineteenth century skill.

Critical thinking is important, in any century. Does learning music add foster critical thinking? I don’t know, but maybe that is not the most relevant question. Disciplined thinking is also important, equally important to critical thinking in my humble opinion. Does learning music foster disciplined thinking? I think it does. What else fosters disciplined thinking?

Is “focused thinking” different from critical thinking or disciplined thinking? I’m not sure. What else about thinking should we think about, of any century? Imaginative thinking? Aesthetic thinking? Philosophical thinking? Values thinking?

The idea that the mind is a muscle and needs exercising has long been out of favor. But the idea that the mind needs extensive practice in different kinds of thinking is somewhat similar, and sounds pretty sensible to me.

When I was young I think it was generally true that people thought of dance as something you learned, much like music. To do it right you had to learn the steps and practice, even take lessons. A little later, probably in the sixties, I think that changed. Dancing, at least popular dancing, was not something you learned. You just got out on the floor and did it. Is this good? Is this bad? Does dance, or learning to dance, have anything at all to do with thinking? Is it valuable for disciplined thinking? Are athletics valuable for disciplined thinking? Maybe dance brings in disciplined thinking, aesthetic thinking, social thinking, and somatic thinking.

When I was in elementary school I realized I could not draw, and was quite aware that a few of my classmates could. Later in life I realized that most people are like me. They can’t draw either. But I wish I could draw. Was drawing a nineteenth century skill? Or were most people as bad at drawing then as they are now?

Can drawing be taught? Over the years I realized that we did a lot of art in elementary school, but I don’t think we were ever taught art, especially drawing. I know nothing about art or teaching art, especially drawing, but I just have a intuitive feeling that it can be taught. Could we make that a twenty-first century skill in some substantial way? (And I don’t mean in some syrupy draw-your-feelings way.)

In talking about various types of thinking I do not mean to imply that the justification of any subject has to be its contribution to thinking. Music is its own reward. Being able to draw is its own reward. But their possible contributions to thinking is still important to consider.

I realize I’m rambling, but I think it might be worthwhile to give some critical thought to these and related questions.

I wonder if “old” will ever stop being a bad word in America. To say you support 19th Century values and skills makes you a laughing-stock or a contemptible reactionary. Yet many –maybe most –successful civilizations have revered tradition. Even Europe once held great esteem for ancient learning and methods. In 14th century Italy top thinkers were touting first century skills.

According to the book there has never been a time in American history when public schools were willing and able to educate the masses to a high level of attainment. Some form of skills movement and orientation always seems to arise when you broaden the group to teaching content to those who aren’t being taught such information at home.

Isn’t the 21st century skill movement merely a successor to the manual training emphasis of the early 20th and the life adjustment movement of the mid 20th?

I’m joking, but only a little. The study of music was very much a part of a person’s education 150 years ago. It not only had some practical value (singing schools cropped up all over the South so that people could participate more fully in church services), but there was a kind of understanding that music did something good, though not quite definable for the mind and for the soul.

What is tangible about the study of music is that you learn pretty quickly that you need to practice, that there are opportunities to work in groups towards a common end, that you learn aesthetics from the inside, and that it reinforces your understanding of simple math, particularly fractions.

As for me, I say no to all of the above.

The “21st Century” thing seems to be, from what I’ve seen, a fancy name for progressivism, for applying John Dewey’s philosophy to education — for training students to think that truth is a social product, to think that truth is consensus; to think that there are no timeless, universal absolutes; to think that one cannot reason, but must just do “what works,” which cannot be known in advance and which has to be determined after acting.

We need a return to reason in education. Not “reason” in any sense that might be mouthed by some of the modern educational theorists or by the intellectual progeny of Dewey, but reason in its true sense, in the tradition of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Sir Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Galileo, Newton, John Stuart Mill (in his Mill’s Methods), Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, Michael Faraday, Ayn Rand. When education is essentially about training students to reason, and does so by means of teaching content (math, science, history, literature, language), there is no need for “band-aids” or “patch work” like “critical thinking.”