Getting serious about "21st century skills"

I'm enjoying Jay Matthews' take on a new report about 21st century skills. Matthews, a widely respected education reporter for The Washington Post, is wary of anything plastered with the "21st century" label, dismissing it as "a marketing trick." And he's got a point. I've heard a lot of talk about how students need to be more creative and critical thinkers, able to invent and innovate and filter information on the fly. It sounds good in theory, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't what I hoped my daughters would someday be able to do. But I worry about how hard this will be to attain among children who, at very young ages, are given little room to explore intellectually, pigeonholed and herded into rote learning and letter-recognition drills, with little curiosity-driven learning at all. It is during early childhood that the seeds of those 21st century skills must be sown.

Matthews' beef with the concept is more about teachers: how they are rarely given the time, resources and roadmaps to actually make creativity and critical thinking part of their classroom strategies.

In his post on the Class Struggle blog a few weeks ago (I know, I'm slow) he rethinks some of his concerns, in light of this report, written by Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at the Education Sector, a think tank in D.C. I'm looking forward to digging into Silva's work.

By the way, for more thoughts on 21st century skills, don't miss "Digital Dialogue," the series of Q-and-As I conducted with three leading thinkers this summer for Parents' Choice. I interviewed Sir Ken Robinson, Barry Joseph, and Nichole Pinkard. Their thoughts on this subject continue to reverberate with me.