What Are We Cultivating Anyway? 21st Century Skills Between Past and Future

• In Event: 25.086 - Sheraton Roundtable Session One - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 25.086-12 - The Challenge of Cultivation

Abstract

The rebranding of the aims of schooling as the cultivation of 21st century skills has all the hallmarks of an educational fad: exaggerated hyperbole that ignites heated debate between proponents and critics; an unclear conceptualization that allows different groups to utilize this term according to their ends; and perhaps most importantly, a surprising capacity to endure. Unfortunately, in this paper, I am joining this bandwagon by arguing that despite, or perhaps because of their inherent flaws, 21st century skills could serve as an opportunity for productive interaction between work on virtue (or moral) cultivation in philosophy of education and situated accounts of action in theories of learning.
Although the question of what are 21st century skills is a subject fraught with disagreements, the term is most commonly used to capture the set of skills that students need to develop in order to succeed throughout their lives. Criticisms of this concept have often focused on the instrumentalist vision of education underlying its use, which subjugates of the aims of education to the demands of the workforce (Levine & Kawashima-Ginsberg, 2015). I focus on another aspect of this phenomenon, which is problematic yet potentially productive – the mismatch between the modes of behavior advocated by proponents and the title of “skill” under which they are packaged.
The appeal to 21st century skills relies on two central assumptions: (1) in light of the rapid rate of technological development students need to be prepared to an ever changing world; (2) education needs to shift from a (supposed) emphasis on content-specific skills, towards the cultivation of broad and adaptable ones such as critical thinking, problem solving, and self-direction (Dede, 2010; Pellegrino and Hilton, 2013). I argue that the designation of such behaviors as skills is intended to present them as easily adaptable on the one-hand, and value-neutral on the other. If someone acquires a skill, she is expected to be able to apply it relatively consistently across a wide range of contexts. Moreover, it is only within the context of their application, that these skills gain moral value.
Yet, I argue that the 21st century skills mentioned above are inherently context-dependent and value-laden. More importantly, putting together such an argument could serve to bring together research on the situated nature of learning and literature on the cultivation of virtues and moral reasoning. Whereas researchers interested in learning have repeatedly shown that the notion of unproblematically transferring skills across contexts is highly dubious (e.g., Beach, 1999), the disparate literatures on moral and character education have emphasized that flexible conduct relies on an underlying set of values that guide conduct; from the Aristotelian notion of phronesis (e.g., Kristjánsson, 2015), to the Kantian-inspired prominence of moral reasoning (e.g., Peters, 1963). Thus, it is through their (failed) effort to argue for value-free adaptability that 21st century skills invite us to examine the possible cross-fertilization between philosophical inquiries into the value-laden nature of adaptive behavior, and work in learning theory on how the transformation of conduct plays out in concrete contexts.

Authors

• Gideon Dishon, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Hemy Ramiel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev