21st Century Competencies, Skills, Whatever

In the New World, they have decided that the 21st century (10% of which has already passed us by) requires the development of three main clusters of skills:

1. making use of data/information/knowledge;
2. making decisions concerning individual and social life; and
3. creating useful outputs by synthesis and/or collaboration.

In Atlantis, they have decided to describe these clusters as:

1. civic literacy/global awareness/cross-cultural skills;
2. critical and inventive thinking; and
3. information and communication skills.

For some reason, these skillsets are being touted as the new educational must-haves, as if they are something like Athena sprung fully-formed from the head of Zeus. Come off it, educators. You dropped the ball and now you are renaming the game. These skills have always been needed. You could find them in the marketplaces of Atlantis centuries ago, in the agoras of Greece long gone, in lost and legendary cities as well as places like the souks of Cairo and Byzantium Istanbul. Wherever humans have come together in civis or polis, there too have these skills been needed.

They are NOT tools unique to the 21st century, no matter how catchy the propaganda sounds. They are the Apollonian sense-making instruments that oppose the Bacchaean and Dionysian chaos and primal instincts of our passions and desires. They stand, have always stood, between us and the Dread Anarch.

Although these tools have lost in the past, they need to hold the line if we are not to enter darker times. To understand why they are more needed now than ever before, and thus why people are labelling them '21st Century' when they were as relevant at the dawn of civilisation, we need to note just two things: 1) there are now more people than ever before in the history of humanity; and 2) there is now more available data than ever before in that same history.

This means that 1) getting people to work together and solve problems and plan for the future is more important than ever before; and 2) making sense of the data-stream, like being forced to drink the ocean, is the new magic. And there has only ever been one coherent myth which attempted to resolve the difficulties while preserving the world of men.

I speak, of course, of the myths of the Norsemen. In those myths, Odin Allfather made it his quest, for which he suffered on the World-Tree and gave up his eye, to find the overarching wisdom that would save creation from Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods.

With Thought and Memory as his aides, he still lost. But he found the right solution: ameliorating the destruction while planting the seeds for rebirth. Meanwhile, his son Thor was busy trying to drink the ocean by brute force, and failing.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Development Fail

I could hardly credit it, but the UNDP once put its fingerprints on Atlantean education. The UNDP report for 1982 is full of interesting stuff, four points of which were:

• School administrators should be encouraged to study administrative theory and incorporate their learning into practice.
  
• Administrators should be encouraged to develop their professional competency and rely on professional authority rather than legal authority in carrying out admin duties.
  
• Research activities should be encouraged and results effectively disseminated so that usable information can be shared.
  
• The talents of able practitioners should be utilised in training programmes for potential school administrators.

It turns out that this is sometimes not the case. Rather, the last 25 years since the Diploma in Educational Administration was first begun in 1985 have shown us that there are some competent administrative staff who are subcompetent school administrators. The best way to test this is to check on the staff who are under such administration.

• Is there a culture of theoretical study followed by praxis?
  
• Do teachers rely on professional authority rather than legal authority when dealing with students?
  
• Are research activities encouraged and are findings and results shared openly throughout the school?
  
• Are talented practitioners used to train less talented practitioners?

If the answer is no to one or more of these points, the institution has systemic problems. By analogy with the human body, it is as if an organic system has begun to show signs of failure — the effects will spread to other systems if countermeasures are not instituted promptly. A transplant of a major organ may become necessary.

What's worse is that you might find another sign of serious developmental failure when you ask the question, "What is the main mode of knowledge-building here?" In many cases, this is inductive. The teacher demonstrates problem 1, 2, 3 etc and shows solutions. Then the teacher shows problem n and asks for answers. These answers are normally based on patterns and processes from problems 1, 2, 3... (n-1). The inductive method of teaching allows students to simulate process learning while actually only knowing one process: how to generate a product that looks as if complex cognitive processing has occurred, when all that has occurred is pattern-recognition and selection of a match.

What's even worse is that this pattern-recognition-matching idea can be taken to the logical end of studying elements out of context but faking the contextual knowledge. You could be blithely answering questions on World Literature without actually having read the text, since the question is matched in your mind by an appropriate answer that you've memorised. This is similar to the Chinese Room test of intelligence. You can indeed almost create a semblance of intelligence as long as the input generates the right corresponding output, whether or not real intelligence is present.

In order to defeat this, you need to make the machine synthesize answers to problems with no real solutions or problems which are outside its data domain. For example, you could grab a random student who claims he has studied a certain literary text, give him a random comic book, and then put him in isolation to write a 2000-word essay on the relationship between the text and the comic.

I believe that a good test of whether a teacher is competent is to randomly grab a teacher and set a synthesis problem in an isolated workroom. For example, a test of expertise in organic chemistry might be to put a chemistry teacher in a lab without access to external input and ask her or him to synthesize a sample of p-nitroaniline (or 1-amino-4-nitrobenzene) within a 3-hour time limit. Another good example would be getting a TOK teacher to write a passable full-length TOK essay in 3 hours without prior preparation or choice of topic. This kind of test would probably work in most disciplines.

And most of all, it would be fun! Any teacher who didn't think so would automatically fail, since all teachers ought to enjoy demonstrating their competency. Why else would they be teachers?