21st Century Skills Are Really MuchOlder Than That
Stephen Moore
I can remember, from when I was in 1st grade way back in 1984, something shocking that my California Public Elementary School Librarian said to us children: "I don't want you to learn anything, I want you to learn how to learn anything." While I instantly understood that she meant well - that she was going to give us tools for how to use the library (a vast treasure trove of of information, emotion, experience and knowledge) I can also distinctly remember that it felt so sad and empty for me. She was, after all, an adult! She had lived so much longer than any of us, than many of us put together - surely she had found something worthy to teach us. Surely there was more to her legacy than simply passing us empty skills. Surely she had some pearls of wisdom to share hidden behind those kind eyes. It never came - or rather, if it did, it came by antithesis. She was bound (by the system) to only offer us 21st Century skills. Of course, they weren't called that yet - the 21st century was still far away in the future when we might have things like robot servants and flying cars. I was happy and thankful to learn how to use the card catalog and dewey decimal system that day (a technology that is now endangered if not extinct) - but I really had hoped that a person who spent her days around books would have offered more to us.
Education should offer these 'life skills', or '21st Century skills' - of course - but that is certainly not all that it should offer. As many have noted these are not new to the 21st Century at all but have been around for some time in culture and education (Higgins 2014). People have been shaping other people through teaching and educating and patterns of being for millennia - with shifts in the context of course - "a shift in emphasis" (Higgins 2014). Tools change but values essential to being human do not. Education shouldn't (and in reality doesn't ever) just teach students how to think. It should (and sometimes does) help them by teaching them what to think. It can teach us how to decide what to think about, and how to share with, influence and selectively be influenced by others - or in the case of many educators today, by absence of these teachings, to learn nothing. My dear librarian was teaching us that day that it didn't matter at all what we learned, as long as we knew how to go about doing it - that was the anti philosophical worldview lesson taught to us - intentionally or not.
Some would seek to throw out the baby with the bathwater by saying that education is only valuable if it is contemporarily contextual - out with the old and in with the new. At what cost? Even the baby? These types of arguments go something like this: why would we use chalk when we could use a smart board? Why would we use pencils when we can type? Why teach fish-grabbing when we can teach net making - and then quickly morphing the how into the why - skills into values and tossing them out together. Why teach values when you can invent your own new values? They offer solutions like: "What we don’t want to do is create our own ‘‘cyber-tooth curriculum’’ which will need to be changed as technology evolves throughout the 21st century. We need a balance between the ‘‘wise’’ elders’ view that the ‘‘essence of true education is timelessness’’ and the perspective of the younger and more inventive members of the tribe on practical and applicable skills for the contemporary world." (Higgins 2014). This 'solution' seems to negate the content of the wise old elders, taking the how to do things (which changes) and conflating it with the values and reasoning of why to do things. When people justify their actions based on a how-to or a 'just because I can', then we have trouble. Lasting, life-sustaining values are taught - not invented. If the crypto mania of the 21st Century has taught us anything, it is that things can get pretty wonky when we start inventing our own values.
In the game of Life, the board-game that is, the object of the game is to collect as much money and stuff as you can to be the winner. This basic premise holds as the life goals of much of education. Education has often been noted as a tool for normalizing and standardizing people for the benefit of a system and those who run it - fewer and bigger voices, saying more and more, meaning less and less (Miller, 1984). To some, being a "globally competent learner" might mean that one is universally finally form-fitted for employability in one of the many multinational corporations. They might wear the right uniforms, have the right set of tech tricks for paying to drink the right coffee at the right time, listen to the right music and, above all, know how to get along with others (or cancel them) so as not to slow down the line or disrupt the flow. These outcomes are often nurtured in empty motives wearing terms like "21st Century skills" or "essential skills for 21st century success" which include subdomains like "Learning and Innovations Skills (LIS) domain, the Career and Life Skills (CLS) domain, and the Digital Literacies Skills (DLS) domain." (Kjuvna 2014). These skills are not wrong in themselves, but they are also not complete. They build in some good 'how to' but have very little to do with the what or the why. This is an empty motivation for education with an empty end: "Equipping them with these skills will help not only to make them better educated individuals but also better citizens who will be able to make a greater contribution to commerce and to civil life in the Digital Economy of the 21st century." (Kjuvna 2014). In other words, they will be well trained consumers - well oiled cogs in happy heartless machines feeding an economy. Isn't there more to Life than what the board-game offers?
A problem with teaching 21st C skills is that they are often taught with empty motives - because success is often defined in economic or employability terms: "The full promise of class room learning is dependent, however, on its ability to incorporate 21st century skills in its instructional design, delivery and implementation. In this increasingly competitive global economy, it is not enough for students to acquire subject-level mastery alone. Skills like creative thinking, problem-solving, communication and analytical thinking are necessary for all levels of success, from entry-level jobs to engineering and technical fields." (Donovan 2014). It is not wrong to give students these wonderful skills - but to what end? They are certainly not an end in themselves. They are good tools - but to give a child free access to a library, or to a google image search tool - without giving them guidance and instruction in eternally true values - is a bit like giving a child a knife or a gun.
A refreshing, seemingly new and revolutionary but actually not so new perspective on the emptiness of teaching skills alone comes from Dorothy Sayers over 70 years ago.
"For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education— lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
The truth is that for the last 300 years or so we have been living upon our educational capital. The post-Renaissance world, bewildered and excited by the profusion of new “subjects” offered to it, broke away from the old discipline (which had, indeed, become sadly dull and stereotyped in its practical application)... Just so, many people to-day who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it.
But one cannot live on capital forever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And to-day a great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits—yes, and who educate our young people, have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the scholastic discipline." (Sayers 1947).
Where Sayers and some proponents of 21st Century Skills education might meet is on the common agreement that "subjects" alone are not sufficient in themselves - there is more to education that is necessary and lacking. 21st C skills educator Divya Senan (2013) would agree saying: "Technologies are not an end in themselves; technologies are tools students use to create knowledge and to create personal and social change." They would also agree that the list of 21st Century skills (though Sayers would never have called them that) are more lasting skills than whatever the contemporary tech trends are.
Where they might not agree is on the source of, purpose for, and age of this list of skills. They would not agree on the dating of these skills (if we don't get so specifically temporary as to pin the tech to say 'digital' we can see that this list is as old as humanity at least). They also might not agree is on the source and purpose. Sayers points out that the power and value in these skills is founded in Christian ethics (whether or not we have historical and/or spiritual perspective to recognize that). Both ladies promoted the goals of personal and social change, but Sayers also saw much more than that: the recognition and subsequently the adoration of God.
What is the value in Cultural Sensitivity if we are not able to recognize that every culture has reflections of God to be found somewhere in it? What good is communication if there is no real love to communicate? The love of money does not qualify here. What is the difference between Living Productively for one's own self goin and Living Productively for the sake of loving others? Where is the joy in collaboration? Is it merely in getting more work done?
Taking a look at the list of 21st Century skills, we see that there is a direction, an urge, a deep longing - to be more human and reflect more divine spark - in students, teachers, people, society, the world - much more than a cold academia without it. It is written on our human hearts that there is more than the mechanics of "subjects". This longing stems from an upward calling, a heart cry for heaven (whether or not we recognize it as that). The success of collaboration is not merely in doing more work or accomplishing more together. The lasting success is ethereal. It is in that flash of our Creator that we see in one another. In an education that offers a Biblical Worldview, we see that these so called '21st Century skills' are actually natural out-flowings of that worldview. We collaborate because we are called to help one another - and there is joy in that. We use tools because we are called and expected to be good stewards of our talents. We are creative because we are created in the image of a creative Creator! There is joy in that too! We are problem solvers because we are given a ministry of reconciliation - and there is great joy in seeing the broken fixed. We are critical thinkers, because there is joy in finding truth.
-Miller, M. C. (January 01, 1985). Big brother is you, watching. Pushcart Prize X : Best of the Small Presses.
-Higgins, S. (2014). Critical thinking for 21st-century education: A cyber-tooth curriculum? PROSPECTS, 44(4), 559–574. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-014-9323-0
-Donovan, L., Green, T. D., & Mason, C. (2014). Examining the 21st Century classroom: Developing an innovation configuration map. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 50(2), 161–178. https://doi.org/10.2190/ec.50.2.a
-Kivunja, C. (2014). Teaching students to learn and to work well with 21st Century skills: Unpacking the career and life skills domain of the new learning paradigm. International Journal of Higher Education, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v4n1p1
-C.Senan, D. (2013). Infusing BSCS 5e instructional model with multimedia : A promising approach to develop 21st century skills. i-Manager's Journal on School Educational Technology, 9(2), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.26634/jsch.9.2.2494
-Sayers, D. (1947) THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING, speech at Oxford University retrieved from https://classicalchristian.org/the-lost-tools-of-learning-dorothy-sayers/
Stephen Moore
I can remember, from when I was in 1st grade way back in 1984, something shocking that my California Public Elementary School Librarian said to us children: "I don't want you to learn anything, I want you to learn how to learn anything." While I instantly understood that she meant well - that she was going to give us tools for how to use the library (a vast treasure trove of of information, emotion, experience and knowledge) I can also distinctly remember that it felt so sad and empty for me. She was, after all, an adult! She had lived so much longer than any of us, than many of us put together - surely she had found something worthy to teach us. Surely there was more to her legacy than simply passing us empty skills. Surely she had some pearls of wisdom to share hidden behind those kind eyes. It never came - or rather, if it did, it came by antithesis. She was bound (by the system) to only offer us 21st Century skills. Of course, they weren't called that yet - the 21st century was still far away in the future when we might have things like robot servants and flying cars. I was happy and thankful to learn how to use the card catalog and dewey decimal system that day (a technology that is now endangered if not extinct) - but I really had hoped that a person who spent her days around books would have offered more to us.
Education should offer these 'life skills', or '21st Century skills' - of course - but that is certainly not all that it should offer. As many have noted these are not new to the 21st Century at all but have been around for some time in culture and education (Higgins 2014). People have been shaping other people through teaching and educating and patterns of being for millennia - with shifts in the context of course - "a shift in emphasis" (Higgins 2014). Tools change but values essential to being human do not. Education shouldn't (and in reality doesn't ever) just teach students how to think. It should (and sometimes does) help them by teaching them what to think. It can teach us how to decide what to think about, and how to share with, influence and selectively be influenced by others - or in the case of many educators today, by absence of these teachings, to learn nothing. My dear librarian was teaching us that day that it didn't matter at all what we learned, as long as we knew how to go about doing it - that was the anti philosophical worldview lesson taught to us - intentionally or not.
Some would seek to throw out the baby with the bathwater by saying that education is only valuable if it is contemporarily contextual - out with the old and in with the new. At what cost? Even the baby? These types of arguments go something like this: why would we use chalk when we could use a smart board? Why would we use pencils when we can type? Why teach fish-grabbing when we can teach net making - and then quickly morphing the how into the why - skills into values and tossing them out together. Why teach values when you can invent your own new values? They offer solutions like: "What we don’t want to do is create our own ‘‘cyber-tooth curriculum’’ which will need to be changed as technology evolves throughout the 21st century. We need a balance between the ‘‘wise’’ elders’ view that the ‘‘essence of true education is timelessness’’ and the perspective of the younger and more inventive members of the tribe on practical and applicable skills for the contemporary world." (Higgins 2014). This 'solution' seems to negate the content of the wise old elders, taking the how to do things (which changes) and conflating it with the values and reasoning of why to do things. When people justify their actions based on a how-to or a 'just because I can', then we have trouble. Lasting, life-sustaining values are taught - not invented. If the crypto mania of the 21st Century has taught us anything, it is that things can get pretty wonky when we start inventing our own values.
In the game of Life, the board-game that is, the object of the game is to collect as much money and stuff as you can to be the winner. This basic premise holds as the life goals of much of education. Education has often been noted as a tool for normalizing and standardizing people for the benefit of a system and those who run it - fewer and bigger voices, saying more and more, meaning less and less (Miller, 1984). To some, being a "globally competent learner" might mean that one is universally finally form-fitted for employability in one of the many multinational corporations. They might wear the right uniforms, have the right set of tech tricks for paying to drink the right coffee at the right time, listen to the right music and, above all, know how to get along with others (or cancel them) so as not to slow down the line or disrupt the flow. These outcomes are often nurtured in empty motives wearing terms like "21st Century skills" or "essential skills for 21st century success" which include subdomains like "Learning and Innovations Skills (LIS) domain, the Career and Life Skills (CLS) domain, and the Digital Literacies Skills (DLS) domain." (Kjuvna 2014). These skills are not wrong in themselves, but they are also not complete. They build in some good 'how to' but have very little to do with the what or the why. This is an empty motivation for education with an empty end: "Equipping them with these skills will help not only to make them better educated individuals but also better citizens who will be able to make a greater contribution to commerce and to civil life in the Digital Economy of the 21st century." (Kjuvna 2014). In other words, they will be well trained consumers - well oiled cogs in happy heartless machines feeding an economy. Isn't there more to Life than what the board-game offers?
A problem with teaching 21st C skills is that they are often taught with empty motives - because success is often defined in economic or employability terms: "The full promise of class room learning is dependent, however, on its ability to incorporate 21st century skills in its instructional design, delivery and implementation. In this increasingly competitive global economy, it is not enough for students to acquire subject-level mastery alone. Skills like creative thinking, problem-solving, communication and analytical thinking are necessary for all levels of success, from entry-level jobs to engineering and technical fields." (Donovan 2014). It is not wrong to give students these wonderful skills - but to what end? They are certainly not an end in themselves. They are good tools - but to give a child free access to a library, or to a google image search tool - without giving them guidance and instruction in eternally true values - is a bit like giving a child a knife or a gun.
A refreshing, seemingly new and revolutionary but actually not so new perspective on the emptiness of teaching skills alone comes from Dorothy Sayers over 70 years ago.
"For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education— lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
The truth is that for the last 300 years or so we have been living upon our educational capital. The post-Renaissance world, bewildered and excited by the profusion of new “subjects” offered to it, broke away from the old discipline (which had, indeed, become sadly dull and stereotyped in its practical application)... Just so, many people to-day who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it.
But one cannot live on capital forever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And to-day a great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits—yes, and who educate our young people, have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the scholastic discipline." (Sayers 1947).
Where Sayers and some proponents of 21st Century Skills education might meet is on the common agreement that "subjects" alone are not sufficient in themselves - there is more to education that is necessary and lacking. 21st C skills educator Divya Senan (2013) would agree saying: "Technologies are not an end in themselves; technologies are tools students use to create knowledge and to create personal and social change." They would also agree that the list of 21st Century skills (though Sayers would never have called them that) are more lasting skills than whatever the contemporary tech trends are.
Where they might not agree is on the source of, purpose for, and age of this list of skills. They would not agree on the dating of these skills (if we don't get so specifically temporary as to pin the tech to say 'digital' we can see that this list is as old as humanity at least). They also might not agree is on the source and purpose. Sayers points out that the power and value in these skills is founded in Christian ethics (whether or not we have historical and/or spiritual perspective to recognize that). Both ladies promoted the goals of personal and social change, but Sayers also saw much more than that: the recognition and subsequently the adoration of God.
What is the value in Cultural Sensitivity if we are not able to recognize that every culture has reflections of God to be found somewhere in it? What good is communication if there is no real love to communicate? The love of money does not qualify here. What is the difference between Living Productively for one's own self goin and Living Productively for the sake of loving others? Where is the joy in collaboration? Is it merely in getting more work done?
Taking a look at the list of 21st Century skills, we see that there is a direction, an urge, a deep longing - to be more human and reflect more divine spark - in students, teachers, people, society, the world - much more than a cold academia without it. It is written on our human hearts that there is more than the mechanics of "subjects". This longing stems from an upward calling, a heart cry for heaven (whether or not we recognize it as that). The success of collaboration is not merely in doing more work or accomplishing more together. The lasting success is ethereal. It is in that flash of our Creator that we see in one another. In an education that offers a Biblical Worldview, we see that these so called '21st Century skills' are actually natural out-flowings of that worldview. We collaborate because we are called to help one another - and there is joy in that. We use tools because we are called and expected to be good stewards of our talents. We are creative because we are created in the image of a creative Creator! There is joy in that too! We are problem solvers because we are given a ministry of reconciliation - and there is great joy in seeing the broken fixed. We are critical thinkers, because there is joy in finding truth.
-Miller, M. C. (January 01, 1985). Big brother is you, watching. Pushcart Prize X : Best of the Small Presses.
-Higgins, S. (2014). Critical thinking for 21st-century education: A cyber-tooth curriculum? PROSPECTS, 44(4), 559–574. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-014-9323-0
-Donovan, L., Green, T. D., & Mason, C. (2014). Examining the 21st Century classroom: Developing an innovation configuration map. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 50(2), 161–178. https://doi.org/10.2190/ec.50.2.a
-Kivunja, C. (2014). Teaching students to learn and to work well with 21st Century skills: Unpacking the career and life skills domain of the new learning paradigm. International Journal of Higher Education, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v4n1p1
-C.Senan, D. (2013). Infusing BSCS 5e instructional model with multimedia : A promising approach to develop 21st century skills. i-Manager's Journal on School Educational Technology, 9(2), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.26634/jsch.9.2.2494
-Sayers, D. (1947) THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING, speech at Oxford University retrieved from https://classicalchristian.org/the-lost-tools-of-learning-dorothy-sayers/