Granted, the 21st-century skills idea has important business and political advocates, including President-elect Barack Obama. It calls for students to learn to think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece. But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?
There are ways, some teachers tell me. Tim Burgess, a physics and chemistry teacher in Alabama, said he tried coaxing students to think for themselves. He laid out clues and let students sort them out together -- and it worked. "Suddenly, it became clear how 21st-century thinking was far more important than the mounds of content we were expected to force-feed our victims (I mean students)," Burgess said.
The 21st Century skills movement is nothing more than an excuse for continuing not to teach content under the mistaken belief that if you teach students how to think (i.e., how to learn how to learn), content becomes irrelevant internet access.
Unfortunately that's not the way it works. Critical thinking skills are domain specific. If you want to think critically about the American Civil War you unfortunately need to know a lot of stuff about American history, European History, military history, the American Civil Wat itself, and lots of other bring stuff like that.
This doesn't necessarily mean that students need to spend lots of time memorizing minutiae, but they at least know enough general knowledge to be able to pass those silly internet tests that embarrassingly show that today's (and yesterday's) students don't, in fact, know this stuff. There must be some sort of mental framework in place for Google or Wikipedia to be useful.
Instantaneous access to information doesn't guarantee that one will know what to do with the information after it's located.
Although, I think there is one useful 21st Century skill that students should be taught: how to set the time on their VCR's to lose that technological incompetence badge of shame: .
Or maybe not.
(That lame ending joke is actually a good example of what I'm talking about. It depended upon my knowing a few pieces of minutiae: 1. That there is an annoying blinking HTML tag (something I've known for some time) and that VCRs are no longer being manufactured (something I learned last week). And my being able to quickly retrieve those facts in real time as an example of obsolete skills, the importance of knowing facts, and critical thinking (the ability to synthesize those facts to make the joke) to end the post. The other point is that a good comedian should never have to explain his jokes. I leave it up to you to deconstruct that one in the comments.)
Update 1: Apparently, IE doesn't properly display the BLINK HTML tag. That's probably a good thing. Use your imagination.
Update 2: Willingham beat me to the punch. "But these 21st-century skills require deep understanding of subject matter, a fact that these reports acknowledge, albeit briefly. As I have emphasized elsewhere, gaining a deep understanding is, not surprisingly, hard. Shallow understanding requires knowing some facts. Deep understanding requires knowing the facts AND knowing how they fit together, seeing the whole. It’s simply harder. And skills like “analysis” and “critical thinking” are tied to content; you analyze history differently than you analyze literature, a point I’ve emphasized here. If you don’t think that most of our students are gaining very deep knowledge of core subjects—and you shouldn’t—then there is not much point in calling for more emphasis on analysis and critical thinking unless you take the content problem seriously. You can’t have one without the other."