Join the conversation

Will Craig Jerald effect a truce in the 21st-century skills fight? Read his new report for the Center for Public Education and draw your own conclusions.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about: Almost a year ago, a battle erupted between champions and skeptics of 21st-century skills. Some skeptics charged the champions with pushing fuzzy skills at the expense of content knowledge. Some champions charged the skeptics with turning facts into fetishes and all but ignoring vital skills like problem solving and critical thinking. Along the way, people on both sides held out hope for common ground.

Jerald's report reads like an attempt to stake out that common ground. He takes 21st-century skills seriously and does much more than most to define slippery concepts like problem solving, collaboration and creativity. He also insists that such skills "are best taught within traditional disciplines."

As Jerald defines them, some of those 21st-century skills seem just as at home in the nineteenth. Creativity, for example, is the ability "to combine disparate elements in new ways that are appropriate for the task or challenge at hand.” Give that idea a more lyrical turn, and you get Shelley's vision of the poetic mind forging “a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”

But Jerald's report has real implications for the here and now. More people need those skills now than did in Shelley's day. And assessing those skills well is a very 21st-century problem. Too bad that most of our state tests are relics of a simpler time.