Education's circle game: Skills and 'reinventing high school' are back

Reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic aren't enough in the modern age, say school reinventors. Students need communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking skills. Nobody's quite sure how to define, teach and measure these skills, reports Patrick O'Donnell on The 74. But a lot of people are trying.

Skills for the Future, a partnership between the Carnegie Foundation, the Educational Testing Service and several states, has "released its breakdown of its first three skills — collaboration, communication and critical thinking," writes O'Donnell. The XQ Institute, which hopes to "reinvent high school," calls "developing measurements of soft skills one of its 10 keys to adapting high school education for the future."

Note there's an attempt to rebrand "soft skills" as "durable skills," on the theory that these are skills of lasting value.

Pathsmith, created by America Succeeds, is breaking down skills into a set of subskills, writes O'Donnell. (Confusingly, he interviews the CEO of a foundation who's also named Patrick O'Donnell.) "Skills include leadership, fortitude, character and mindfulness."

The online California Critical Thinking Test "has tried to gauge student skills of analysis, inference, evaluation, induction, and deduction for several years, even being used by some universities to verify whether students were learning well," writes O'Donnell.

It's a work in progress.

"Oh look, we are reinventing high school — again, writes Holly Korbey. "By teaching skills!" She remembers "21st-century skills."

She notes that cognitive scientist Dan Willingham writes, “We are not even sure the general [critical thinking] skills exist, but we are quite sure there is no proven way to teach them directly.”

In a European review of curriculum policy, she writes, researchers warned that asking teachers to teach “21st Century Skills” across the curriculum "often led to teacher confusion and overwork."

AI doesn't change what students need to learn, writes Rick Hess. "We’re constantly told by a parade of tech bros, education impresarios, executives, and politicos that 'the age of AI' demands less in the way of traditional academics and more focus on 'soft skills' like 'communication, problem-solving, and collaboration'.”

"Students can’t think deeply about nothing," Hess writes. If they study literature, history, math and science, they'll have something to think critically about. And, learning academic content doesn't prevent students from "learning empathy, collaboration, and problem-solving."

To prepare students for the “age of AI,” we should give them a rigorous, engaging content-rich education, Hess writes. "Job one for schools should be teaching a broad base of knowledge that will prepare students to be autonomous, thoughtful adults."

Hess has written a number of parodies of "22nd-century skills" and the "visionaries" who promote "transformational solution-ness."