"Nihil novi sub sole..." (Ecclesiastes 1:9, Biblia Sacra Vulgata).
There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9, NIV).
There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know (commonly attributed to Ambrose Bierce).
Recently, we had an English department meeting in which the concept of "21st century" skills was kicked around a bit. It got me to thinking: what are the things we want to teach that are actually bona fide skills unique to the 21st century? Very few of them are going to turn out to be 100% brand new. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that none of them are truly new. However, many of them need to be freshly prioritized or even rediscovered, and a few are simply so rare in the general population and so hard to teach that they need to be attempted over and over with the hope that they begin to stick.
So what things need to be freshly invigorated in today's high school curriculum?
Citizenship: Voting and advocacy are hardly inventions of the 21st century (pretty sure the Greeks had lobbyists), and neither is Yellow Journalism (the 1890s saw the first iteration of the kind of shoddy journalism we still see today). However, we do live in a highly partisan era and an era in which we're saturated with information that does not organize itself with the most accurate facts at the top. So we need to focus a huge amount of attention on teaching kids how to sort information, how to assess its credibility and bias, and how to draw strong conclusions from evidence instead of warping evidence to support their preconceptions. That last one is incredibly difficult, since the human mind naturally creates cognitive biases, and learning to identify your own is, by definition, always a challenge.
Nuance: One kind of cognitive bias is the human mind's resistance to nuance. It wants answers, black and white clarity, good guys and bad guys. In many situations, it's quicker and easier to think that way, but life's most difficult questions are difficult precisely because they're not manichaean. They require us to search our world and our souls for answers, and we cannot ignore our responsibility to teach kids how to approach these questions openly and honestly.
Education in Metaphor: I borrow heavily from Robert Frost's "Education By Poetry" for this concept, but I think his 20th century sentiment—rather 19th century, actually—still speaks loudly for the 21st:
They are having night schools now, you know, for college graduates. Why? Because they have not been educated enough to find their way around in contemporary literature. They don’t know what they may safely like in the libraries and galleries. They don’t know how to judge an editorial when they see one. They don’t know how to judge a political campaign. They don’t know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable. And metaphor is, of course, what we are talking about. Education by poetry is education by metaphor.Though I'm working off a version later published as an essay, Frost first gave this talk exactly eighty years ago in February 1931. No matter how many times I find predictive wisdom in the words of an old master, I still feel that little thrill like a static shock. We have to teach kids to interpret metaphor—and rightly under the umbrella of metaphor are all sorts of rhetorical and expressive forms of language—so they can "find their way around" in contemporary literature and life. If you cannot use your skills in logic and metaphor to spot a false analogy when you see one, you will find it very difficult not to be driven about like a sheep. The shepherds have developed some very sophisticated tools.
The last 21st century skill that's frying my brain on this fine morning is the ability to articulate and defend your ideas. If we're going to teach kids to develop ethical, honest ideas from their analysis of complex evidence, we had better darn well teach them how to stand up for those ideas and communicate them clearly. That means teaching them to write clearly and teaching them how to contribute in groups of all sizes and compositions. They need to be able to work with a partner towards a common goal, to play the role a small group needs from them rather than insisting on doing things their own way, to stand in front of a group with or without visuals and props and inspire respect.
So there may be nothing new under the sole, but there's definitely always something new in the soul, eh?
