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Myth Number Three: The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
The belief that technological advances fundamentally change students' learning requirements (they now need things like problem-solving skills, the ability to think critically and be creative, and work with others, unlike before) profoundly influences classroom teaching. "In practice, that meant adopting approaches that 'motivated students, helped them to develop their skills in real contexts, provided a clear reason and audience for their work, and made learning relevant'."
"To the extent that it [the concept of 21st century education] says that creativity and problem-solving are important, it is merely banal; to the extent that it says such skills are unique to the 21st century, it is false but harmless; to the extent that it proposes certain ways of achieving these aims, it is actually pernicious. This is because very often, the movement for 21st century skills is a codeword for removing knowledge from the curriculum, and removing knowledge from the curriculum will ensure that pupils do not develop 21st century skills."
A frequently-advanced argument in favour of 21st century education is the flood of new discoveries that results in ever-changing knowledge requirements. But....
"Of course people make new discoveries all the time, but a lot of those new discoveries do not disprove or supersede previous ones; in fact, they are more likely to build on previous discoveries and require intimate knowledge of them. The fundamental foundations of most disciplines are rarely, if ever, completely disproved....
"The scientific and technological innovators who make the headlines tend to be quire young. But behind the headlines, the median age for the first scientific discovery has been increasing steadily over the decades. That is because to make a scientific breakthrough, first of all you have to reach the frontiers of knowledge in your discipline. As scientific knowledge has advanced over the decades, that frontier has got further and further away, which means that it takes researchers more and more time to reach it. What this should show us is that making a new scientific discovery requires an intimate understanding of what has gone before. In Newton's famous words, scientific giants are standing on the shoulders of others....
"The guilty secret of the 21st century skills advocates is that it is their ideas which are rather old hat and outdated. Diane Ravitch notes how, at the beginning of the 20th century, many educators wanted to throw away traditional knowledge and embrace 20th century skills. There is little difference between what Martin Johnson calls a 21st century approach to teaching and what John Dewey was advocating at the dawn of the 20th. There is very little difference between the types of projects the RSA [Royal Society of Arts] are advocating and the types that proliferated at various points in the USA and the UK from the late 19th century onwards. Such projects have consistently failed in a variety of different settings."
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