Beyond 21st Century Skills—How About Beautiful Minds?

The term "21st century skills" is rapidly losing its power to inspire me. While I don't agree with those who promote the idea that skills like creative thinking or collaboration will blossom on their own if schools just teach and assess basic skills and an appropriate canon of academic content, I think the descriptor "21st century" is ambiguous and that the identification of "skills" students will need for future success limits our thinking about this challenge.

Many have pointed out that we're not able to predict what the 21st century will demand of students. Like any other period in the history of education, we're looking about a decade ahead. All that has changed is that we expect change to be exponential over the next decade, so we are less certain that any changes we make today will really be right for 2019. But it's the word "skills" that I feel may be limiting the vision.

Some have objected to the haziness of terms like "critical thinking," predicting that educators will use the vagueness of the definition to claim a spurious success. After all, how can you really measure a person's thinking skill? I give teachers more credit than that. My objection is more against making something as volatile as industry the North Star for schools and continuing to think that we can orchestrate future economic triumphs by articulating what our schools will teach.

What if we were to shift the focus and redefine the purpose of schools as places where we engage and challenge young minds and help them develop and flourish? Instead of envisioning only outcomes like a new generation of computers or medical breakthroughs or energy solutions and the wealth and power that come with them, why do we not spend some time thinking about the kinds of minds we really need in order to achieve and sustain the good life throughout our world? Will we be able to prepare our kids for the challenges ahead through incremental teaching of discrete skills?

I know this sounds kind of fluffy and is even more vague than the skills being discussed. I will try to be clearer and more specific in my next post.