At first, I would like to say that this topic is a very good one because it touches some of the most critical matters of the 21st century in regards to the academic world. At the same time, this topic relates to the non-academic world meaning our daily lives, the way we interact, behave and work. Both critics and supporters bring up some very important aspects and discuss from different perspectives which is really good because it allows the readers to see things being discussed from different points of views and also makes them reveal things they might have never thought of. In her article “Critical Thinking? You need knowledge” Diane Ravitch mentions some facts that really convince me about the importance of knowledge. She does not separate knowledge from skills and I believe this is a very strong message. For example in the article with the same name as a above, in 1916 the federal government stated that the academic education was lacking relevance. The way I understand this has to do with how the students at that time were only taught about things and not how to do them. Then years later there was an improvement because according to the article, students had to build pet parks, puppet theaters and do other activities in order to practice and improve their skills. Diane Ravitch says it clearly: It is required activity not docility, and awakened student motivation.” She also relates it to today’s skills doctrine by saying that the model used in the early 1900s was similar to that activity philosophy of nowadays.
It sounded funny to me how the fact about how in Roslyn, Long Island in the 1930s children spent more time baking nut bread assuming that this would help them get better in math. There is a last statement to which I completely agree and that is the one where Ravitch states clearly that knowledge must come first in order to begin to reflect and look for alternative solutions.
On the other side I appreciated very much all the articles, but the one that really impressed me was lawed Assumptions Undergird the Program at the Partnership for the 21st Century Skills.” There were some really good views in there because it had a lot of common sense involved. This article was very domain oriented because it focused on the fact that a lot of groups such as P21 focus only in specific directions such as only business, education and government matters. Well, I think this is good because no one can do everything at once, but at least takes responsibility for teaching certain skills to those students interested on that particular domain. The other thing this article reveals is that a lot of groups like this one only really possess more visions rather than offer “hands on” experience which is directly related to skills. It is also worth to mention the comparison of Steven Spielberg being a great critical thinker in the cinema domain, but probably not a great lead of the Yankees baseball team. This might sound like a funny statement, but to me this conveys a great message. And the message is that without having sufficient knowledge, we cannot put any skills in practice nor be a leader.
The supports seem to be very much on the same side I am. “The Value of teaching 21st century skill” summarizes pretty much in one sentence my point of view: Our role as policy makers, educators, business leaders and parents is to provide the future students with a strong curriculum, meaning to fuel up with knowledge so later they can be useful into practice as skills in order to succeed. I am very much for getting knowledge first and then feeling obligated to use this knowledge in a skill.
Based on personal experience it has happened many times to me to put my knowledge into practice. I started teaching piano when I was only sixteen years old and didn’t know much about music theory, so I didn’t have much knowledge even though I could play piano well. I noticed that I could not explain everything academically because my knowledge was limited, but only after I learned a sufficiently about music theory I was able to teach comfortably and improve my teaching skills even further.
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