21st Century Learning and Teaching

Education may be the passport to the future, but for all the good teaching out there, it would seem that schools are failing to impart some of the most important life skills, according to one educational expert.

Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group, argues that today’s school children are facing a “global achievement gap”, which is the gap between what even the best schools are teaching and the skills young people need to learn.

This has been exacerbated by two colliding trends: firstly, the global shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, and secondly, the way in which today’s school children – brought up with the internet – are motivated to learn.

In his book The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner identifies seven core competencies every child needs in order to survive in the coming world of work.

1. Critical thinking and problem-solving

I think that approaching the problem of education in one only direction is a mistake. I don't think that learning instructors, companies, nor users could be directly blamed. There are many factors involved in a training or educational process. The most visible and common ones are the figure of the teacher and the learner, but we also take into account the organization, policy, resources available, social context…

We should stop for a moment and analyze what is happening. Is it a matter of education in its most global dimension? Is it a problem related to making oneself comfortable by the part of some people who haven't developed an interest in self-improvement and learning? Is it a poor approach by the part of the educational processes?

That's a lot of questions and I'm afraid they won't have a clear and direct answer.

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