From my point of view, we need our graduates to be both facile with content and able to apply this knowledge to the challenges they will face in the future.

The reductionism NCLB has brought to our schools serves no one. It leaves the US with a generation of students that don’t see the relevance of their work in schools and the US with a work force that leaves this great nation in a weakened position in the global marketplace.

Hmmm, I am not an American, and perhaps I have misunderstood American culture, but this surprises me. I thought that group performances like school bands, nativity plays, school musicals and sports teams were common and popular parts of American schooling experience, as much as in any other country in the world that I know of, perhaps more so than in British schools. Am I wrong?

We pooh-pooh group assigments–seeing only the development of a mini-hierarchy in which the strong carry the weak, rather than seeing any value in the skills of brainstorming, selecting ideas, making decision and utilizing varied strengths of participants.

Mightn’t this have something to do with the fact that in elementary and secondary schooling, many of us think that it should be about developing students’ strengths as individuals? There are plenty of people who started off struggling with a subject and doing poorly and then wound up pursuing careers or even teaching in that subject – the best maths teacher I had at high school said he had struggled with maths himself, and I think that was part of what made him good, he was aware of all the ways in which students could misunderstand things because he’d done that himself. If he had spent all his schooltime working in groups that utilised his then-strengths, would he have required the expertise in maths that he did?

We focus on producing performers and forget that without an educated audience, the performance is always lacking. We forget that a performer must understand not only the music, but also how to communicate that music to an audience.

Do we forget this? I have my doubts. For example, look at this data from the NCES on music teaching in schools – http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2008/2009488_2.pdf, page 12 of the pdf. According to this, at grade 8 in 2008 only 8% of students reported that no instruction in music was available. 57% attended schools in which music instruction was being offered at least 3-4 times a week (up from 43% in 1997) and a further 27% schools that offered music instruction 1-2 a week. If “we” are forgetting that without an educated audience the performance is always lacking, how come 84% of schools are teaching it? Don’t you think that scheduling music lessons, dispatching students off to them, and so forth would remind them from time to time?

And as for “communicating that music to an audience”, how many music teachers in the country forget this? Presumably the internet being the internet, you could find a few oddballs. But I have my doubts that this is a significant problem.

This kind of social experience counters our American zeitgeist of rugged individualism–and is in fact sadly missing from most of American education. We pooh-pooh group assigments–seeing only the development of a mini-hierarchy in which the strong carry the weak, rather than seeing any value in the skills of brainstorming, selecting ideas, making decision and utilizing varied strengths of participants. We focus on producing performers and forget that without an educated audience, the performance is always lacking. We forget that a performer must understand not only the music, but also how to communicate that music to an audience.

I agree with the folks who suggest that 21st Century is a misnomer–although the need for these skills is critical to the advancement of industry and we are losing out to other countries who already understand this. I also applaud LS for recognizing that merely using technology in the classroom–in ways that it is already widely used elsewhere–is an important aculturization to what is needed. And as a parent, I would point out the vastly improved efficiency of accepting online submissions over hard copies carried in notebooks and backpacks–and far to often getting lost on the way or returning home again.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by kriley19: Joanne Jacobs: 21st century skills: no substance http://bit.ly/1Pm4bZ Full http://bit.ly/212YYt...

Oh yes, by all means we need to focus on 21st century skills while most kids can’t do basic math!!
Absurd