Chapter Six: The 21st Century Skills Debate

Where I stand on the debate

As a future English teacher, I tend to value the hard copies of things. I’d rather hold a book in my hands than navigate the non-linear format of a blog or digital text. Therefore, I tend to agree with the critics of the 21st Century Skills movement. I agree with the cognitive psychologists who argue that one must develop basic knowledge before they reach deep understanding, such as a subject area’s application to technology. I am not against teaching technology, career, and life skills in school, but, like other critics, I fear that the new standards will lead to schools sacrificing basic content understanding by focusing too much on more applied skills. I also fear that schools will spend a great amount of money on new state-of-the-art technology and that will be underused or ignored as it was for the most part when it first arrived in my high school, Chatham High School, before I graduated in 2006. Now, according to the Frontline video, technology is a big part of CHS, but I find myself relating to the English teacher featured who felt discouraged by it rather than exited.

Ravitch writes in “Critical thinking? You need knowledge”:

Inevitably, putting a priority on skills pushes other subjects, including history, literature, and the arts, to the margins. But skill-centered, knowledge-free education has never worked. (Ravitch)

I would rather see the money spent saving social sciences and arts programs in schools that are often cut first (by politicians such as NJ Governor Chris Christie), than on initiatives many teachers do not believe in and are likely not adequately trained in themselves.

I support the goal for students to “master skills such as cooperative learning and critical thinking and therefore be better able to compete for jobs in the global economy,” but I’m not fully convinced that the standards will accomplish this (Ravitch).

Argues Ravitch:

For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have
paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world. (Ravitch)

As my favorite English teacher said a few days ago when I returned to my old middle school to catch up with her: “In college, English majors are still reading books and writing papers about them. So why is everyone making such a big deal about this (Technology/21st Century Skills in school)?”

My response to Ken Robinson's talk about the need for creativity in schools


I agree with Robinson's statement, "[C]reativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status" (Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity).  I have always considered myself a creative person, and as such I always thrived in school classes that emphasized creativity the most, from the box sculpting we did in pre-school to the printmaking class I took in sophomore year of college.

Robinson states, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original" (Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity).  This quote struck me because it mirrors what my professor of my Teaching, Democracy and Schooling class (Vince Walencik) always says--that schools teach kids that making mistakes is the worst thing one could do, and that this is the wrong message for learning.  As humans, we learn many of the most valuable lessons by making mistakes.  As Professor Walencik jokes, "We learn never to marry that person again after we get a divorce."  It is the same for mastering most concepts in school.  We improve our understanding and skill from both our successes and our failures.

Robinson states:

We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.  We know three things about intelligence.  One, it's diverse.  We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.  We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.  Secondly, we know intelligence is dynamic.  If you look at the interactions of the human brain...intelligence is wonderfully interactive.  The brain isn't divided into departments.  In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, it comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. (Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity)

But schools tend to value facts and test scores more than other measures of intelligence such as the arts and social intelligence.

Can we integrate this into schools?  Yes, I don't see why not.  It isn't a matter of money, but one of a new attitude, which can actually be harder to acquire.  But, I think we can and we should in order to improve eucation.