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Is your child learning the skills they need to thrive and prosper in the increasingly cutthroat world of the 21st century? I recently returned from participating in the National Academies' Workshop on 21st Century Skills, which addressed this issue. Before we get to C21 skills, we might wonder whether American kids are making sufficiently rapid progress with those boring old skills from previous centuries. A recent study by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek compared levels of advanced proficiency on a standardized math test taken by 15-year olds in 60 countries, broken down on a state by state basis. The best US state, Massachusetts, placed a respectable but hardly stellar 17th, between Austria and Slovenia. At the other end of the spectrum, states like West Virginia, New Mexico and Mississippi occupy a lower tier of attainment alongside nations such as Serbia, Chile and Thailand. (The December 2010 issue of Atlantic Magazine has a nice exposition of the study, aptly but depressingly titled ‘Your Child Left Behind'). No question that the National Academies are right to make educational science a priority.
What additional skills will children need to take into a 21st century adulthood? I don't have space here to discuss the workshop at length, but you can find further details at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bota/Assessment_of_21st_Century_Skill…. In short, I picked up two somewhat different themes from the workshop. First of all, there are some genuinely new skills associated with advances in information technology. Children may be familiar with tech from a young age, but that isn't quite the same as acquiring those skills in creating and using technology that will be most prized by employers. The creativity side of computer skills is especially important for driving a knowledge economy.
Presentations at the workshop featured recent developments in building sophisticated software for learning. Art Graesser of the University of Memphis is testing a game-like environment for science learning in which the student interacts with on-screen characters (‘animated conversational agents'). Learning technologies of this kind may be important both for engaging student interest, and for developing an experience that is immersive enough to encourage both critical and creative thinking. With rapid advancements in software for virtual reality, the possibilities are truly exciting.
A second theme is the renewed salience of some familiar skills we are used to applying to daily life as much as to work assignments. Today's students can look forward to change and uncertainty as two leitmotifs of the C21 workplace. The obvious source of change is technological advancements. Less obvious are the accompanying social changes. In particular, as workers move between different work teams, it becomes important to get rapidly onto the same cognitive and emotional page with new co-workers. Working with strangers may be an activity we are not particularly well equipped to do, by evolution and culture. (Needless to say, the C21 employee needs to be able to ditch any ethnic, gender or other stereotypes right from the get-go). Thus, skills for managing stress, for forming new and constructive relationships, and for negotiating different values and perspectives, are at a premium.
One of the presentations that impressed me at the workshop concerned the Envision schools in the San Francisco Bay Area (www.envisionprojects.org). These are a group of schools that might under other circumstances be performing at around the Serbia-Chile level, if that. In fact, 94% of their graduates attend 2- or 4-year college. Their secret is to focus on project work that integrates technology and art - and is rigorously assessed - along with personalized mentoring. The students appear to be learning both academic and social skills beyond those of the traditional curriculum.
And what of personality, the topic of this blog? There appear to be various traits of value to citizens of C21, not least standard cognitive intelligence (so-called IQ). There is good evidence that intelligence is especially helpful in dealing with novel cognitive challenges. Personality traits include emotional stability (for coping with the stress of change and uncertainty), openness (motivating interest in new work assignments), extraversion (opening up to new people) and agreeableness (being cooperative with new people). Not altogether coincidentally, these are traits that overlap with ‘emotional intelligence' (I will leave aside critical perspectives on emotional intelligence for another day).
A word of caution is in order though. It's not hard to see the advantages of being outgoing, empathic and resilient in the C21 workplace, but not everyone can be like this. Indeed, another Psychology Today blogger, Jean Twenge (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissism-epidemic), has claimed that there may be generational changes in traits such as narcissism, and it is hard to see narcissism contributing to a harmonious workplace in the new century. However as I have discussed in my books, it is a mistake to see personality traits as having good and bad poles. The introverted, the emotionally changeable and the tough-minded (‘disagreeable') all have valuable qualities to offer. Creativity, which I mentioned earlier, is a case in point. Highly creative people - think Van Gogh and Kerouac - are not always the easiest to get on with. So we need ways to accommodate individuals across the personality spectrum in the 21st century workplace - which will take some skills on the part of 21st century managers.
