Twenty-First Century Learning as a Radical Re-Thinking of Education in the Service of Life

Patrick Howard

doi:10.3390/educsci8040189

Abstract

The education reforms called for in 21st century education initiatives have been characterized as radical. International efforts to reformulate education for 21st century teaching and learning are well-funded initiatives by coalitions including governments, not-for-profit organizations, and large corporations. This article is a critique of the emergence of 21st century learning showing that a preoccupation with competencies and skills can be interrogated for that to which 21st century learning gives voice, but also for that which it silences. The fundamental question of the purpose of education, or for what do we educate, is virtually absent in most discussions of 21st century learning. Finally, I offer an alternative curricular vision to the techno-optimistic belief in progress prevalent in the discourse of 21st century learning. In the call for radical reform, I propose another understanding of the word “radical,” one that includes an ecocentric, life affirming understanding that roots education in a life code of value and in a living community of relations large enough to embrace the multidimensionality, the responsiveness, and responsibility at the heart of the pedagogical relation.

Highlights

Global efforts are underway to re-conceptualize K12 education for what is commonly known as 21st century teaching and learning
Many of these initiatives were formed in partnership with large corporations with the stated mandate to shift education priorities to new education goals and to disrupt deeply embedded education practices initiated over a hundred years ago that are still foundational to current education practice [9–16]
It speaks to the tacit purpose of education reform for 21st century learning—to protect and strengthen the social and economic status quo firmly anchored in a market based, competitive economic ideology

Summary

Introduction

Global efforts are underway to re-conceptualize K12 education for what is commonly known as 21st century teaching and learning. The national and international shift to 21st century learning is due, in large part, to numerous reports and whitepapers published in the last decade, and well-organized, well-funded education initiatives launched by non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations [8]. The term used to describe educational change happening today was originally called 21st century skills and it started to emerge as early as the 1980s when government, educators, and large corporations in the United States began publishing reports designed to inform education trends and to influence how students and workers could be better prepared for the demands of a rapidly emerging globalized, knowledge economy and digital society. The transformation called for, when viewed through a critical lens, is anything but radical as the end of education is understood to be the creation of the knowledge worker

The Skills and Competencies: A Closer Look

A Critique of Learning

Towards a New End for 21st Century Education

Money Code of Value versus Life Code of Value

Creativity and the Life Process

Conclusions