Want to read a whole book about how education should be reshaped to fit the needs of America’s biggest companies? Then we recommend Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel’s new book, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times, a book-length ad for the content-free learning championed by the Partnership for 21stCentury Skills. Trilling is global director for the Oracle Education Foundation, a P21 board member. Fadel is global leader for education as Cisco Systems, also a P21 board member. They co-chair P21’s Standards, Assessment, and Professional Development committee.
Why are 21st century skills so important? Trilling and Fadel’s answer is that a “21st century skills gap” causes businesses to spend “over $200 billion a year…finding and hiring scarce, highly skilled talent, and in bringing new employees up to required skill levels through costly training programs.” (7) (There isn’t a citation for either the existence of a “21st century skills gap” or for the $200 billion figure.)
So Trilling and Fadel argue that the skills identified as “21st century skills” by P21 (critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity and innovation, etc.) must become the basis for education because these skills “address new work skill demands” and will prepare students to “invent new and better services and products for the global marketplace.” (49, 56)
The authors imagine schools shifting from a “20th century model” to a “21stcentury model” in order to teach 21st century skills. In the 21st century school, according to Fadel and Trilling, class time would include “50 percent time for inquiry, design, and collaborative project learning and 50 percent for more traditional and direct methods of instruction.” (135) Why? Because “[p]rojects – defining, planning, executing, and evaluating them – have become the currency of 21st century work.” (82)
Here’s the authors’ argument in a nutshell: In order to better serve business and save the for-profit world $200 billion a year, we need to replace at least half of the curriculum in America’s schools with an unproven program that puts the needs of business before the needs of students. Trilling and Fadel don’t consider the possibility that there are students who might want to be scientists, doctors, teachers, artists, or any of the host of occupations that don’t involve “invent[ing] new and better services and products for the global marketplace.” And they neglect entirely our schools’ role in the creation of knowledgeable citizens.
Jay Mathews, reviewing Trilling and Fadel’s book on the Washington Post’sWebsite this morning, said that he is “trying NOT to write off the 21st century skills movement as a sham, but its leaders don’t make it easy.” We agree.
James Elias and Lynne Munson
Note to the Fadel and Trilling: just as virtuoso violin playing requires years of work playing scales, learning to read music, working out fingering, etc. so high-level and creative thinking depend on years of mastering basics like math, language, science, etc. You don’t produce concert violinists by having eight-year olds frequently try to play Tschaikovsky violin concertos at Carnegie Hall. Similarly, you don’t produce great thinkers for Oracle by having eight-year olds act like Oracle project managers. There is a problem with American schools, but it’s not too little P21-style project work, it’s too MUCH P21-style project work that is preventing kids from mastering the fundamentals they need to become virtuoso thinkers.
Maybe so, but it doesn’t make sense to be agnostic (as Core Knowledge is) about the methods used to teach the content either. The French system is very content-specific (on the first Tues of October at 11 O’clock the French minister of education can tell you what every French child is memorizing.) But what do they produce after twelve years of this? Frenchmen! People with no initiative whose greatest aspiration (find the citation yourself) is a government job and who think they need a letter from the Governement or permission from the French Academy before they can start a company, write a novel, start a school, coach a team! etc. etc. Active Learning Habits-of-Mind are as important as the content!
“[p]rojects – defining, planning, executing, and evaluating them – have become the currency of 21st century work.”
That would be a great class … in the last year of school prior to employment.
Which for non-burger-flipping knowledge workers would be senior year in college.
So – great – they should implement this brilliant idea by getting a “project management” course added to College curriculum. That would save the companies from make the worker bees take such courses.
Among the other flaws in this concept is the fact that THE SKILLS AND BEHAVIORS THEY SPEAK OF ARE NOT SUITED FOR K-12 BUT FOR COLLEGE. Sorry for shouting, but this fact is crystal-clear … and it is a sign of many previous fads/fetishes – they all suffer from the delusion of treating K-12 kids like they are closer to the workplace than they are.
Or the flip-side – if the employees are not ‘work-ready’ is that not an issue with the higher ed community and not K-12? the levels at which critical inquiry, project work and design are far more applicable?