<p>Here’s another interesting take on what constitutes practical education for 21st century careers, from Cathy Davidson, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University:</p>
<p>"The twentieth century might well be defined as the century of standardization, efficiency, specialization, and certification. School and work, as we have inherited the terms, are all about standardization and about division of knowledge and certification of attainment of expertise in one area of knowledge. But that is not the world our children are inheriting in the 21st century. By one estimate, 65% of the jobs that will be available upon college graduation for students now entering high school (that’s eight years from now) do not yet exist. So we are preparing them as experts and as specialists for jobs we can’t even yet imagine? Are we making them experts in obsolescence? </p>
<p>"Doing well on standardized tests of existing knowledge is not a job skill; it is a checklist of facts many of which are fast becoming outmoded (or rendered irrelevant by Google). Standardized testing is not the apparatus for assessing logical abilities, inference, imagination, creativity, problem solving, project management, collaborative or communication skills, or the ability to retool oneself in the fact of enormous changes in one’s chosen profession or field. Facts. That is what standardized tests test. Or answers. Calculations. Those things may or may not be relevant to the future ways of working successfully together. Yet that skill at item-response testing is what the 20th century calls standards. Success at that form of standardized knowledge is what is necessary to get into college today. But doing well on standardized tests is not the skill you need to succeed in the workplace today. We have a mismatch. We are doing a good job training students for the twentieth century.</p>
<p>“With the Internet and the World Wide Web, no one is at the controls saying which information will go where. All information is bundled at the end point (my computer or, at most, my server) and then capable of being captured by any other end point (your computer), without a broadcaster, a publisher, an editor, a manager, a company, a foreman, or a CEO. This end-to-end principle requires collaborative skills, judgment and logical skills, synthesizing and analytical abilities, critical and creative skills, qualitative and quantitative skills, all together, with few lines between them. This end-to-end principle of the Internet and the World Wide Web have an impact on how we work, on how we communicate, on how we interact, on how we gather as citizens, on how we gather as global observers, on how we organize and how we disrupt organizations, on levels small or large.”</p>