Let's Stop Forecasting 21st-Century Skills

Why educators should stop forecasting 21st-century skills and get on with teaching

By Christopher L. Doyle

Educators make bad prognosticators of the future. There is no shame in that. Politicians, stock-market players, CEOs, and gamblers, people with a lot at stake, routinely fail in their predictive efforts. But when school “reformers” try to reorder education based on “21st-century skills,” or what some describe as “teaching tomorrow’s skills to today’s students,” they show not only lack of prescience, but also ignorance of the past.

History suggests that public schools are abysmal failures at teaching skills needed for the future. Exactly a century ago, public education in the United States and Western Europe was rife with reform movement, much of it predicated on anxiety about national security and business competitiveness.

The language reformers used 100 years ago sounds familiar. “They talked about accountability, about cutting red tape, about organizing coalitions to push educational reform,” writes historian David B. Tyack in The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education . Early 20th-century educators, business leaders, and politicians wanted to replicate a Gilded Age corporate model of decisionmaking and leadership and impose...