21st Century Skills

While it is rarely defined, teaching “21st Century Skills” seems to be the latest educational fad. One of the larger local private schools devoted its entire school magazine to the school’s new emphasis on “21st Century Skills”

I was reading the Core Knowledge Foundation blog and they had just wrapped up a symposium on the merits, or lack thereof, of the “21st Century Skills” phenomenon. Diane Ravitch, the education historian and author of The Language Police:How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, wrote:

“There is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st century skills movement. The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the twentieth century. Their call for 20th century skills sounds identical to the current effort to promote 21st century skills. If there was one cause that animated the schools of education in the 20th century, it was the search for the ultimate breakthrough that would finally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content (italics mine).”

As alumnus, former pipe band member, and now very successful attorney Oscar De La Rosa once told me, “Good learning is hard work.”