I recently participated in a conference attended by over 100 school heads and board chairs from all over the country. In general the focus of the conference was on governance issues, but at one break-out session we were asked what skills we thought would be most important for students as they leave our schools and move on to their adult lives in the 21st century. I have to confess that I am generally skeptical about such questions. I recognize that learning has to be relevant to real life, but I hesitate to envision our educational system as nothing but a source of training. More to the point, I would not want for my school to be pressured to rewrite its curriculum for fear of not being sufficiently au courant.
As I challenged myself to think through the question as carefully as possible and to best understand its implications for my three year-old grandson, I realized that the demands of the next generation will be fundamentally different from the demands of previous generations. My hypothesis is that the children of today’s schools will need both the motivation and the technical skill to confront a world with shrinking vastly shrinking resources; my hope, that their education will provide them with the intellectual tools needed to discern problems, the personal appetite to care about solving them, and the critical-thinking competencies to engineer both viable and long-lasting solutions to these problems.
We live in an age of rapidly changing paradigms: globalism, cultural identity, ecology, political discourse, social networking, and family structure. I believe that these changing paradigms have created great pressure for today’s educators, and naturally I am sympathetic to the huge task that lies ahead. My recommendation is for educators to concentrate on re-conceiving the purposes of their curriculum and to worry less about re-designing the content of their curriculum. If we only focus on curricular change, we will undoubtedly lose sight of the bigger picture. The children of today’s schools will inherit a different world, to be sure. Our greatest, most pressing challenge is to invest in them both a concern about that world and an ability to do something about it.
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