Are There Deficits in 21st Century Skills? 70 Years of Evidence from Anthropology and Cultural Psychology

• In Event: A Critical Analysis of Global Competence and Other 21st Century Skills: Gaps, Fissures, and Erasures within OECD PISA

Proposal

Although commentators have pointed out that so-called “21st century” skills are not really new, they rarely cite specific evidence. Yet taking this claim seriously raises questions about why the OECD and other international organizations promote these competencies and why many nations have revised learning goals and curricula in response (Author 2021; Author 2017).

This paper fills the evidence gap by revisiting research in anthropology and cultural psychology that documents how children in many societies have learned competencies in home and community, particularly before the arrival of Western schooling (e.g., Lancy et al. 2010). The literature also shows how adults, including blue-collar workers in post-industrial societies, already demonstrate 21st century skills on the job (e.g., Rose 2004).

Lists of 21st century skills vary, but I focus here on competencies assessed by PISA, emphasized by the OECD (2005, 2020), and/or promoted by the EU (2006, 2018), namely: oral and written communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, digital and information literacy, global competence, financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

The ethnographic record illustrates children and adults learning or exercising almost all of the skills on this list outside school settings. For example, children often learn collaborativeness when participating in the widespread practice of sibling caretaking (e.g., Maynard & Tovote, 2010; Weisner & Gallimore 1977). One partial exception is creativity, which is sometimes discouraged (Lancy & Grove, 2010). Global and intercultural competence might be another exception. While migrants demonstrate skills at crossing cultures (e.g., Chee & Jakubiak, 2020), at the same time ethnocentrism seems to occur in all human groups and warfare in the vast majority (Antweiler 2016).

Although ethnographic records do not exist for every skill in every society, the findings are extensive enough to raise the question: If people develop most of these competences in the course of everyday life, why is it now important for schools to incorporate them into formal curricula? The question is important because there are costs to this reform, such as further overloading the curriculum (Rockwell 2021; OECD 2020) and distracting from other pressing needs like support for teachers.

True, tests like PISA’s may identify supposed deficits, but ethnographies raise questions about validity of tests when the same people who fail tests are observed demonstrating ostensibly identical competencies in daily circumstances (e.g., Lave 1988).

True, employers seek (some of) these skills; a study of US job ads found demand for communication, collaboration and problem solving, although not for the other competencies (Rios et al. 2021). However, ironically, schools already teach written communication, while there is some evidence that Western schooling can disrupt learning collaborativeness at home (Rogoff et al. 2005). Meanwhile, it was not education but rather redesign of assembly lines that enabled workers at Toyota to solve problems collaboratively (Fujimoto 1999). Moreover, demonstrating 21st century skills is a poor guarantee of jobs for young people in today’s context of un- and underemployment (Buchanan & Toner 2006).

Author

• Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, U Michigan–Dearborn