What should students learn in the

21st century?
By Charles Fadel

Founder & chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign 


Vice-chair of the Education committee of the Business and Industry Advisory

Committee (BIAC) to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD)


Visiting scholar, Harvard GSE, MIT ESG/IAP and Wharton/Penn CLIt has become
clear that teaching skills requires answering “What should students learn in the 21st
century?” on a deep and broad basis. Teachers need to have the time and flexibility to
develop knowledge, skills, and character, while also considering the meta-layer/
fourth dimension that includes learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, and
personalisation. Adapting to 21st century needs means revisiting each dimension and
how they interact:

Knowledge – relevance required: Students’ lack of motivation, and often

disengagement, reflects the inability of education systems to connect content to real-
world experience. This is also critically important to economic and social needs, not
only students’ wishes. There is a profound need to rethink the significance and
applicability of what is taught, and to strike a far better balance between the
conceptual and the practical. Questions that should be answered include: Should
engineering become a standard part of the curriculum? Should trigonometry be
replaced by more statistics? Is long division by hand necessary? What is significant
and relevant in history? Should personal finance, journalism, robotics, and other new
disciplines be taught to everyone – and starting in which grade? Should
entrepreneurship be mandatory? Should ethics be re-valued? What is the role of the
arts – and can they be used to foster creativity in all disciplines?

Skills – necessity for education outcomes: Higher-order skills (“21st Century

Skills”), such as the “4 C’s” of Creativity, Critical thinking, Communication,
Collaboration, and others are essential for absorbing knowledge as well as for work
performance. Yet the curriculum is already overburdened with content, which makes
it much harder for students to acquire (and teachers to teach) skills via deep dives into
projects. There is a reasonable global consensus on what the skills are, and how
teaching methods via projects can affect skills acquisition, but there is little time
available during the school year, given the overwhelming amount of content to be
covered. There is also little in terms of teacher expertise in combining knowledge and
skills in a coherent ensemble, with guiding materials, and assessments.
“Character” (behaviours, attitudes, values) – to face an increasingly challenging
world: As complexities increase, humankind is rediscovering the importance of
teaching character traits, such as performance-related traits (adaptability, persistence,
resilience) and moral-related traits (integrity, justice, empathy, ethics). The challenges
for public school systems are similar to those for skills, with the extra complexity of
accepting that character development is also becoming an intrinsic part of the
mission, as it is for private schools.

Meta-Layer: Essential for activating transference, building expertise, fostering

creativity via analogies, establishing lifelong learning habits, and so on. It will answer
questions such as: How should students learn how to learn? What is the role of
interdisciplinarity? What is the appropriate sequencing within subjects and between
subjects? How do we develop curiosity? How do we facilitate students’ pursuing of
their own passions in addition to the standard curriculum? How do we adapt curricula
to local needs?
So what is actually being done to ensure that our workforce is skilled for 21st century
success and to ensure that students are skilled, ready to work and contribute to
society?
The global transformation, often called the “21st century skills” movement is helping
move schools closer to learning designs that better prepare students for success in
learning, work and life. The OECD Skills Strategy is responding to this by shifting
the focus from a quantitative notion of human capital, measured in years of formal
education, to the skills people actually acquire, enhance and nurture over their
lifetimes. My hope is that schools, universities and training programs will become
more responsive to the workforce and societal needs of today, and students will
increasingly focus on growing and applying essential 21st century skills and
knowledge to real problems and issues, not just learning textbook facts and formulas.
This will raise levels of creativity and innovation, and provide better skills , better
jobs, better societies, and ultimately better lives.