21st Century Program Needs
Cost will certainly be an enormous consideration, but just as important, the decision needs to be driven by the need to create the kind of learning environment in which our children will thrive, not just survive, as global learners in the 21st Century. The pace of change in the world is so rapid that experts have said it is impossible to predict what the future will look like as soon as five years from now.
Study after study suggests that the traditional school experience is not enough to prepare students for this “unknown” world in which they will live. In 2005, well-respected educational visionary William Daggett in Successful Schools: From Research to Action Plans, suggested that schools must still prepare students in the Three Rs, but they are no longer the reading, writing, and arithmetic of the traditional educational system. The new Three Rs are Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships.
In the last century, often called the “Age of muscle and brawn,” the schools were focused on producing students with a good work ethic, discipline and patience for repetitive work, and basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The future, [actually the world we are living in today] might be called the “Age of the Mind.”
Howard Gardner, author of Five Minds for the Future, has delineated the kinds of characteristics or “types of minds” that will be needed by our students in this “Mind Full” world. He says that successful citizens in the future will need to:
- Be able to think creatively and independently and apply different learning strategies in new situations.
- Be open to new ideas and a determination to reach high standards of achievement.
- Be continually learning to steadily improve their skills and understanding.
- Be able to gather information from disparate sources and make sense of it by understanding and objectively evaluating that information.
- Recognize interrelationships, patterns, and symbolic information.
- Reflect on and consider the needs of the greater society, able to relate to others and manage themselves.
- Show resilience and self-reliance, be able to work in partnerships and in teams and apply critical thinking in new contexts.
We believe that these characteristics, habits of mind, and abilities are achievable and teachable if we focus on student understanding and teaching for meaning and purpose. However, we know they will not derive from the demands from Federal mandates of curriculum and structure we have in our schools today. As noted by Gardner, we are still teaching for the past, for the industrial age, the age of muscle and brawn. We are tethered to a skills-based, test-driven educational process that expects mastery of facts and formulas rather than encouraging thinking and creativity. The current process is serving neither the students nor their teachers.
Our goal will be to continue to learn how to design our curriculum, develop our instructional strategies, and refine our process of education to assure the students that graduate from our schools are equipped with the Mind of the Future, able to create, to synthesize, to be disciplined thinkers, and able to make sense of complex, real-world situations.
From Gardner, H. (2006) Five Minds for the Future, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press
