Importance Of Learning Skills In The 21st Century

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Preparing students for work, citizenship, and life in the 21st century is complicated. Globalization, technology, migration, international competition, changing markets, and transnational environmental and political challenges add a new urgency to develop the skills and knowledge students need for success in the 21st century context. Educators, education ministries and governments, foundations, employers, and researchers refer to these abilities with terms that include “21st century skills,” “higher-order thinking skills,” “deeper learning outcomes,” and “complex thinking and communication skills.” Interest in these skills is not new. For example, for more than 40 years, researchers at Harvard University’s Project Zero have been studying how …show more content…

We use the term 21st century skills because we believe that it is currently the most widely recognized and used term internationally, though we could just as easily substitute any of the previously mentioned terms for 21st century skills. Critics denounce the term for being vague and overused,1 for endorsing the idea of teaching skills apart from knowledge, and for promoting skills that have been encouraged for centuries yet are now emphasized with a new sense of urgency that could lead to rapid and unsuccessful reforms.2 In the following sections, we briefly summarize current efforts to define 21st century skills and explain the economic, civic, and global rationales for why they are important. We attend to the criticisms levelled against 21st century skills by examining why these skills must be taught primarily through disciplinary content, taking care not to “trivialize subject matter”3 and then identifying specific ways to do …show more content…

The economic rationale is that computers and machines can cost-effectively do the sorts of jobs that people with only routine knowledge and skills can do, which means that the workplace needs fewer people with only basic skill sets and more people with higher-order thinking skills. Further, supply and demand in a global rather than national or local marketplace increases competition for workers who can add value through applying non-routine, complex thinking and communication skills to new problems and

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