Education for the 21st Century

By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

With dismal regularity, we return to efforts to improve K-12 education. These efforts usually fail because education is conceived narrowly as schooling. Yet improvements to schools do not necessarily correspond to an improvement in the education of children. Whether or not children will learn does not depend primarily on what happens in school, but on the experiences, habits, values, and ideas they acquire from the environment in which they live.

Another limitation of schools is that they concern themselves almost exclusively with the development of cognitive skills, or the passing along of factual knowledge and—at best—critical-thinking abilities. Knowledge of facts and how to interpret them will not result in an educated population unless some wisdom—or the goals and priorities that justify the use of knowledge—is also acquired. Thus, instead of concentrating exclusively on schools as the sites for change, we must take into account the broader processes involved in formative education.

Formative education (what Germans call Bildung ) is the result of a continuous process of interaction between individuals and the environment. Children are formed by their experiences with parents, teachers, peers, and even strangers on the street, and by the sport teams they play for, the shopping malls they frequent, the songs they hear, and the shows they watch. The citizens of the new century will be a product of these various social forces. Schools, while certainly important, contribute only a relatively modest fraction to the...