Commentary by Barbara Beachley, ISM Associate Consultant
"I’m so tired of everyone talking about preparing us for the 21st century! Hello, we’re 10% done with it already!” An insightful junior made this statement in my advisory group when I was an academic administrator, and it reminded me of why students are at the center of my work. They usually know a lot more than I do, and that’s good news because they’re soon going to be running the world.
Does it even make sense to talk about 21st century schools anymore? At this point, all schools are 21st century schools and students are 21st century students and teachers are 21st century teachers—I know this because my smart phone tells me that the date is indeed 2011.
So, no, I don’t believe the term makes sense, but I have yet to find a suitable alternative—one that distinguishes a school that serves our kids effectively from one that utilizes anachronistic procedures, processes, and pedagogies from centuries past. Massive public school systems struggle with some of the same issues as the giant “too-big-to-fail” corporations that lumbered about while smaller start-ups quickly adapted to fill emerging voids in the market. This is not due to lack of effort on the part of many noble educators to reform public education, but is rather an issue of size, resources, and legal constraints. What seems to puzzle and alarm private-independent school administrators is that even with our smaller sizes, freedoms, and resources, many of us more closely resemble Borders than Amazon. We fear facing the same fate as a result of not meeting the needs of our clients—the children we exist to serve.
In response to this fear, we have been bombarded with lists of “21st century skills.” ISM has found this approach to be largely unhelpful because these items can be interpreted as one more thing to “cover,” as opposed to something to discover. What differentiates the 21st century from the past is not necessarily the skills, but the fact that we have no way of knowing what the world will look like when our seniors graduate from college, much less what the future worlds of our kindergarteners have in store.
It is this not knowing that causes us to hesitate to make the kinds of revolutionary changes that will truly transform the education we offer. Ironically, it is exactly this ambiguity and uncertainty that we must embrace as being at the very heart of what we need to teach today’s students. The greatest gift we can give our children is knowing what to do when they don’t know what to do, and this is tough to accomplish if we still think we need to know everything before we act.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of books including The World is Flat and That Used To Be Us, recently gave a speech at the National Governors Association Annual Meeting about the role of education in the global challenges that face us. The entire speech is riveting, but one story that resonated with me concerned an entrepreneur and CEO who identified himself as a “serial job-killer” and stated that “a sustainable job is one I can’t kill, and I can’t kill creative people.”
To develop creative people, we need to be creative leaders. No amount of new technology, LEED-certified buildings, or Mandarin classes is truly going to transform schools until educators become experts at not being experts, and at learning with, from, and for their students. As school administrators, our primary responsibility is to cultivate our faculty to be teacher leaders who help grow student leaders. Even though we may be stuck in the 20th century, the kids have continued to race ahead, and we need to accept that we’ll never catch up—we just need to get out of their way.
Additional ISM articles of interest
ISM Monthly Update for Division Heads Vol. 9 No. 1 Your Advisory Program and Student-Led Conferences Are a Natural Fit
ISM Monthly Update for Division Heads Vol. 8 No. 6 Sir Ken Robinson: Education is Not Fast Food
Additional ISM articles of interest for Consortium members
I&P Vol. 35 No. 5 The 21st Century School: Students
I&P Vol. 35 No. 6 The 21st Century School: Students and Individualized Instruction
