#6 Part 1 - A Fad or the Key?

Wow, so much to digest.  Some of those articles just kept going didn't they?  And, now that I've had several sources telling me just how very wrong the others are, it's time for me to cast my vote for one side or the other.  Are the strategies put forth by 21st-Century movement going to be the salvation of our poor American school system, or are these false-prophets just wasting our time and we should start grabbing our torches and pitchforks?  Seems a little extreme, don't you think?


After reading all of the articles it's easy to see that there are very passionate (sometimes too passionate) arguments from both sides.  From the pros we hear something's clearly wrong, and this is the way to fix it.  The other side is just as sure of itself, but much more over-the-top.  Diane Ravitch and Daniel Willingham each echoed the sentiment that this program can't possibly work because it's putting the cart before the horse.  They feel that the 21st-Century techniques are only being used at the expense of traditional schooling, something that the new system simply cannot work without. "[O]ne cannot think critically," Ravitch says "without quite a lot of knowledge to think about." Obviously I'm not going to dispute that one needs a certain amount of knowhow before performing certain tasks, and sometimes that can't be learned as you go.


In my opinion, however, these guys are a little overreactive... ok, very overreactive.  Their contemporary, Jay Mathews, asked in his unfortunately titled article "The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills," "[h]ow are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?" Clearly you can see what I was saying about extremism, but this man is stating, quite emphatically, that "students [are] still struggling," and he's stubbornly pushing to go back to a way that has already been acknowledged as sub-par?  That just doesn't make sense.  Not once did Mr. Mathews or his colleagues address how the 21st-Century system could be improved, only that it wasn't showing enough positive results to make it worth the extra time and effort.  Really?  Already?  Every critical article here was written in 2009, a little early to be calling for triage.


Obviously we can't yet say that the 21st-Century system is a success just yet, but nor an we say with any certainty that it is a failure.  I certainly don't like everything about the 21st-Century Skills system of education.  I actually agree with these critics that many aspects of the application of 21st-Century Skills can leave teachers a little in the dark, and I don't really get that silly rainbow that they keep pushing on every page.  However, unlike Ravitch, Willingham, and Mathews, I do believe that this is more a reason to push forward than to pull back.  This was always going to be a slow process, a chance to the program along the way, based on its successes and failures.  The problems that these three have with the program are valid, but they are in no way causes for the abandonment of the entire movement, but rather calls for patience.  Whatever changes need to be made should be addressed before this system is left behind.  In his article "Flawed Assumptions Undergird the Program at the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills," Daniel Willingham himself admits himself that this program was always designed as an evolutionary process, that it was meant to change as it went along.  And that's the big pain when it comes to evolution, it takes time.


All three of them said in their articles that the skills and techniques at the heart of the 21st-Century movement were important skills for students to learn, but that they were "nothing new." Diane Ravitch referenced examples from 1911, 1916, 1920, and two of the three articles even referenced the educational importance of these skills during the time of Plato.  If we can agree that these skills and methods have always been seen as having some method, then shouldn't we also agree that they deserve further exploration?