What Are The 21st Century Skills?
We have come to accept that there are certain things called 21st Century Skills. That these are distinct from what used to be 20th century skills, and universal across national boundaries, are implicitly accepted. A common list is also emerging, which include things such as communication, problem solving, critical thinking, initiative, and collaboration, skills that underpin any kind of 21st century work, presumably. The list appears in slightly different modified form at different places, but words, as always, hide more than they reveal. We have no commonly accepted definition of any of these things, except claiming, like pornography, we know it when we see it. But it pays to explore the assumptions that lie behind the idea of 21st century skills. The first assumption, as Philip Brown et al underlines in their insightful Skills Formation in the 21st Century, is that there is a global labour market. The idea that there could be some universal skills valued across nationa...