Many people dismiss “21st century skills” as a pedagogical fad. Although the 21st century skills tenets–creative thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, etc–are sound, there are also some valid emperor-has-no-clothes critiques of this recent learning system buzz phrase.

For example, some critics point out that most Asian classrooms–for example India, China, and Malaysia–are ill-equipped in resources such as technology, LMSs and online learning systems compared to American schools. But they focus the resources they do have on math, science and English. Their idea of “global awareness” might be studying geography.

The US should learn from foreign learning systems and start to stress global knowledge with meat on its bones, like language, geography and world history.

———–

Coggno.com offers world-class LMS platforms.