Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) – original & radical

Mary Wollstonecraft bursts with originality in her thoughts on education rejecting the dry, dull teaching of the day, even recommending peer-justice by students. However, she is best known for her ground-breaking work in politics and education, work on the education of women that has resonated through to 20^th century feminism. She adopted the Enlightenment love of reason in educational theory but wrote a devastating attack on Rousseau’s crude recommendations on the education of women. Women deserved the same education as men and the right to be educated alongside men. But she had more to say on education than this one principle.

Vindications

In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a political work, she is critical of the gender-based language and gender analogies used by Burke and launches a verbal broadside into the monarchy and aristocracy, in favour of republicanism. In this she invokes the Enlightenment ideas of reason and progress. But it is in Chapter 12 of her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that she presents a detailed account of her educational views.

Schools – innovations

She launches a direct attack on the schools and schooling of the day, especially boarding schools, as she thinks it is vital that children receive both home life and some structured respite from home for learning. However, she castigates educators for their ‘fear of innovation’ and decries the lines of benches and ‘parrot-like prattle’. State funded day schools should be available to all. Most importantly, she is firmly against single-sex schools. It is important that both girls and boys learn from and about each other for a harmonious society. Long vacations are undesirable, as they both disrupt learning, leading to forgetting, and place too much pressure on the home environment.

Teaching

Much teaching is pedantic and tyrannical with its recitation and focus on Latin and Greek. And in a prescient passage notes that, ‘It is not for the benefit of society that a few brilliant men should be brought forward at the expense of the multitude’. With echoes of Rousseau she recommends a broad curriculum but with a focus on open air and exercise. And harking back to Socrates, she recommends that some subjects, notably religion, history, the history of man and politics, be taught through conversation.

Peer-punishment

On discipline she recommends that peer-punishment be implemented making it free from teachers, so that the students learn justice from practice. How innovative is that!

Women and education

Rousseau’s position on the education of women, which saw them as not only lacking the abilities of men but be taught for the pleasure of men. Women, Wollstonecraft stated, must seek intellectual autonomy and should not depend on men for that goal. They are not, as some at that time claimed, slaves to their emotional passions and have the ability to develop rational and intellectual passions and abilities. In short, women have the right to the same education as men and to be taught alongside men.

In detail, she provides an analysis of the enslavement to the body beautiful 250 years before the feminism of the late 20^th century. Interestingly, she was sensitive to the different roles women have from men, as wives and mothers, but saw that this only has a bearing in the sense that education and reason improves the skills needed in these roles. This is a debate that is still alive in feminist thinking. But before we see her as a wholly modern, educational theorist we must also remember that she thought that poor children should be taught in separate schools.

Conclusion

It is delightful to read of Enlightenment innovations on the curriculum, the school calendar and discipline that would put our modern-day educational establishment to shame. But her primary contribution is that she challenged society to offer equal political and educational rights to women, claiming that the only way to prove her case was to put it to the test. We did, and it passed the test magnificently. Although it was well into the 20^th century before it happened and even quite recently some Universities did not admit women. A recent vindication of her work is the fact that women, in many countries, now outperform men in education and that the education of women is seen as a key to economic prosperity in the developing world.

Bibliography

Wollstonecraft, Mary, (1786) Thoughts on the education of Daughters

Wollstonecraft, Mary, (1790) A Vindication of the Rights of Men

Wollstonecraft, Mary, (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Wollstonecraft (1759-97) – Women and education...

Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley author of Frankenstein, bursts with originality in her thoughts on education rejecting the dry, dull teaching of the day, even recommending peer-justice by students. So interested was she in education that she even tried to run a school.

However, she is best known for her ground-breaking work on the education of women that has resonated through to 20^th century feminism. She adopted the Enlightenment love of reason in educational theory, hugely influenced by Locke, but wrote a devastating attack on Rousseau’s crude recommendations on the education of women. Women deserved the same education as men and the right to be educated alongside men. But she had far more to say on education than this one principle.

Self-help book

With Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life (1787) she lays out rules for the conduct of a moral and relevant education for women. It reads like a self-help book with no end of detailed recommendations from  fairy tales to breast-feeding. But it has an edge, as she attacks the education of women into the role of card playing ornaments, absorbed in themselves and fashion. Rather harsh on the influence of servants, she was all for a strong parental influence on education. Like Plato she was antagonistic towards too much fiction, especially fairy tales, for your children. She wants strong women, mothers and daughters of independent mind but not as we see it today. Her vision was of women as mothers and teachers, playing roles in societal cohesion and progress. But this is a mere foretaste for her more detailed work on education.

Vindications

In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a political work, she is critical of the gender-based language and gender analogies used by Burke. She also launched an attack on the monarchy and aristocracy, in favour of republicanism. In this she invokes the Enlightenment ideas of reason and progress but it is in Chapter 12 of her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that she presents a detailed account of her educational views.

She launches a direct attack on the schools and schooling of the day, especially boarding schools, as she thinks it is vital that children receive both a home life with some structured respite for learning. However, she castigates educators for their ‘fear of innovation’ and decries the lines of benches and ‘parrot-like prattle’. State funded day schools should be available to all. Most importantly, she is firmly against single-sex schools. It is important that both girls and boys learn from and about each other for a harmonious society. Long vacations are undesirable, as they both disrupt learning, leading to forgetting, and place too much pressure on the home environment.

Teaching

Much teaching is pedantic and tyrannical with its recitation and focus on Latin and Greek. And in a prescient passage she notes that, “It is not for the benefit of society that a few brilliant men should be brought forward at the expense of the multitude”. With echoes of Rousseau she recommends a broad curriculum but with a focus on open air and exercise. And harking back to Socrates, she recommends that some subjects, notably religion, history, the history of man and politics, be taught through conversation. On discipline she recommends that peer-punishment, judgement by fellow students, be implemented, freeing from teachers, so that the students learn justice from practice. How innovative is that!

Women and education

Rousseau’s position on the education of women saw them as not only lacking the abilities of men, but that they be taught for the pleasure of men. Women, Wollstonecraft stated, must seek intellectual autonomy and should not depend on men for that goal. They are not, as some at that time claimed, slaves to their emotional passions and have the ability to develop rational and intellectual passions and abilities. In short, women have the right to the same education as men and to be taught alongside men.

In detail, she provides an analysis of the enslavement to the body beautiful 250 years before the feminism of the late 20^thcentury. Interestingly, she was sensitive to the different roles women have from men, as wives and mothers, but saw that this only has a bearing in the sense that education and reason improves the skills needed in these roles. This is a debate that is still alive in feminist thinking. But before we see her as a completely modern, educational theorist we must also remember that she thought that poor children should be taught in separate schools.

Influence

It is good to read of Enlightenment innovations on the curriculum, the school calendar and discipline that would put our modern-day educational establishment to shame. But her primary contribution is that she challenged society to offer equal political and educational rights to women, claiming that the only way to prove her case was to put it to the test. We did, and it passed the test magnificently. Although it was well into the 20^th century before it happened and even quite recently some Universities did not admit women. A recent vindication of her work is the fact that women, in many countries, now outperform men in education and that the education of women is seen as a key to economic prosperity in both the developed and developing world. 

A memoir published by her last husband portrayed her as a rather unconventional figure and this skewed her reputation for a century and more but her writings are now widely quoted by modern feminists and historians, as a major figure of the Enlightenment. Botting has written about her countering the influence of Burke and Rousseau, as well as her influence on nineteenth century American feminism. Ayann Hirsi Ali quotes her as a huge influence in her autobiography Infidel and many other modern feminists have quoted her as a having a considerable influence.

Why so few women in 2500 years of learning theory?

In presenting my talk on 2500 years of learning theory and theorists, and my series of 260 learning theorists, a question  I often get asked is 'Where are the women?’ True, they are proportionally absent. This is not because of any conscious or unconscious exclusion on my part. The answer is stunningly simple. Women from the Greeks through the Middle Ages, up to the 20^th century were largely excluded, not only from being educators but also being educated. It is a extraordinary story of exclusion.

The dominance of religion and the fact that the dominant, global, religious leaders were all men, as were their zealot educators, meant that women were largely ignored as educators and theorists on learning throughout the Middle Ages. The Reformation certainly helped with its push towards universal schooling but the exclusion of women from the very structure of educational elites across many religions, still meant institutional exclusion. We still live with an antipathy, as we know, by certain religious factions, towards the education of women.

Renaissance

Even the Renaissance did little to improve the matter. Hypatia of Alexandria, a Neo-Platonist, is said to appear on Raphael’s School of Athens but there is an interesting backstory to her appearance. The funder, a Bishop asked, “Who is this woman in the middle?” “Hypatia, the most famous student of the School of Alexandria,” replied Raphael. “Remove her. Knowledge of her runs counter to the belief of the faithful! Otherwise, the work is acceptable,”. So he disguised her as the Pope’s nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere I. The story, apocryphal or not, illustrates the Church’s antipathy towards women as educated intellectuals.

We had to wait until the Enlightenment to hear women’s voices. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was certainly the most original and radical (see my views here). Her attack on Rousseau’s attitudes towards the education of women resulted in a well reasoned defence of the education of women alongside men, for the sake of their own intellectual autonomy, not as Rousseau claimed (see my views here), for the pleasure of men. However, even here, her recommendation that the poor be excluded at age nine, shows a less than generous spirit towards educational equality. Maria and her father Richard Edgeworth’s Practical Education was a deep and practical guide to education that recognised hte autonomy of the leaner but also emphasised practical education. Ada Lovelace can be added to these early thinkers having realised that computation was important.

The astounding fact is that women were almost entirely excluded from formal education, its institutions and even as teachers. This was cultural and legal with girls either excluded from the process of education or, if included, steered towards the domestic and social skills they needed as a wife and mother. The very notion of what it meant to be ‘educated’ was very much a male concern across two millennia. It was not until the 20^th century that a semblance of equality in education, opportunities in teaching and research became possible. Columbia University dod not admit women into undergraduate Degree courses until 1983!

The 20^th century saw drastic changes, politically in terms of the right of women but also in the world of learning. The post World War 1 era saw large numbers of teachers emerge after the carnage of the war. Universities, colleges and teaching were opened up to women, as were opportunities to get degrees and positions in higher education.

Maria Montessori (my views here) was one notable example of a woman who had a real, practical and long-lasting impact on schools and schooling from 1909 in her Montessori Method, which has open classrooms, a looser approach to teaching, more self-directed but still a strong emphasis on method and materials. Her methods certainly seemed to help Page and Brin of Google. Margaret Donaldson, who worked with Piaget and studied Vygotsky. Vicky Colbert was another who founded a schools movement in South America called Escuela Nueva.

We should not assume that just becuase a theorist is a woman, they are right. Katherine Briggs and daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, neither of whom had any training in psychology, set out to design their test and worked with the HR manager of a local bank, Edward Hay to take a smattering of Jung and turn it into a pyramid scheme. Rita Dunn and her husband Kenneth Dunn created a learning styles phenomenon in the 1970s. There are the psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

We had the pioneering study of racism from Mamie Clark, Elizabeth Bjork on memory, Judith Harris on personality, Carol Dweck on growth mindset,,

This struggle and the role of women in education is examined in detail by Jane Roland Martin (my view here), who saw the role of women in education as an unexamined topic. For the actual role of women in education across the ages she recommends we look not at established institutions but in more general literature and popular sources. She rightly states that the very concept of women, reflected in the academic bias in subjects, as opposed to the practical and vocational, the emphasis on schools, schooling and the ghettoisation of women into professions such as teaching and nursing. This wide set of perspectives was needed, she thought, in research into the role of women.

A heroine of mine is Jennie Lee, whose work literally created the Open University. A working class woman, daughter of a miner in Scotland, probable had more impact on Higher Education than any other person in the UK. Barbara Kellerman is a brilliant scholar on leadership.

In the psychology of learning I covered Elizabeth Bjork, Judith Harris and the fascinating group that included Gloria Gery, Victoria Marsick, Karen Watkins and Alison Rossett around informal learning and performance support. There are many others.

There's Mary Immordino-Yang, Lisa Feldman-Barrett on emotions and memory, with very different views. Judith Butler on queer theory and her arch critic Camille Paglia. Also Linda Darling-Hammond on teaching and schools.

More recently we have Jane Hart on learning tools, Ruth Clark on online learning and Daphe Koeller on MOOCs.

Online learning?

More recently, in online learning, one could also say, ‘Where are the women?’, especially on the technology side of the online learning delivery. This is to be explained by the dominance of male figures in the founding and building of large, dominant tech companies. The reasons for this are complex, even rooted in education itself, where girls are subtly discouraged from taking STEM subjects. On the non-technical, side of online learning it is very different, where both learning and online learning is much more gender balanced and there are many women experts and practitioners who are active on technology based learning.

There are few areas of human endeavour where women were so studiously excluded than in learning theory and practice. This was a process of deliberate exclusion but also because philosophical (Greeks), religious and even Enlightenment views, such as Rousseau, placed women in a secondary role. Even well into the 20^th century women had to fight for recognition and that fight is far from over.

Conclusion

I have written articles on 31 women who have played a significant role in learning theory and practice; Hypatia, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ada Lovelace, Maria Montessori, Margaret Donaldson, Vicky Colbert, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Linda Darling-Hammond, Isabel Myers, Katherine Briggs, Rita Dunn, Mamie Clark, Elizabeth Bjork, Judith Harris, Jane Roland Martin, Carol Dweck Gloria Gery, Victoria Marsick, Karen Watkins, Alison Rossett, Barbara Kellerman, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, Mary Immordino-Yang, Lisa Feldman-Barrett, Jennie Lee and Jane Hart, Ruth Clark, Daphne Koeller.

What I have never done is claim this is an exhaustive or even representative list. I write about people I read, admire and sometimes do not admire. Many in this list remain largely unread and unknown to many. I have little time for Myer-Briggs and Feldman-Barrett's theory of emotions but it is important to include those who have been influential rather than just right. My real interest is in the nature of learning, not gender. Nevertheless, the story is definitely one of quite extreme exclusion and of interest in itself.

7 ways women are ignored in education from Jane Roland Martin

Jane Roland Martin is a remarkable woman as she widened up educational theory in line with those such as Dewey and Illich. yet her real contribution is in the many issues around women in education. Her views are inclusive but above all expansive.
1. Women ignored

She saw the role of women as a largely unexamined issue in education. Women had for centuries been excluded from access to education but even recently, ignored in teaching, schooling, higher education.

2, New sources

As women have been denied access to education, excluded from education, educational institutions and the vehicles of educational theorising, she recommends that we must look to wider sources for the views, in magazines, pamphlets, more general literature and the wider media landscape.

3. The educational ideal ignores women

The definition of education itself, Martin claims, has neglected women. Work by women and work about women are often ignored, with the role of women in education hugely under researched and understood. This, she thinks, distorts and misrepresents reality. The very idea of an educated person or educational ideal must take women into account. 

4. Spectator knowledge

Martin excavated, in an anthropological manner, hidden assumptions and problems within education, especially the curriculum of fixed cultural subjects and knowledge, as well as male cognitive perspectives, at the expense of other disciplines and real-world knowledge and skills. She saw curricula and institutions, that focus largely on ‘spectator’ knowledge, as promoting a one-sided view of education. In particular she came to focus on gender through feminism.

5. Education to include domestic context

For Martin, the school as home should be far more relevant to life outside of school, especially the domestic environment of the home. It needs to draw back from a curriculum that focuses largely on ‘spectator’ knowledge. The role of mothering, issues around the ghettoisation of women on professions such as teaching and nursing, as well as the insensitivity to women’s often difficult role at work and at home, led her to a radical stance on taking action across a broad front to rebalance the educational system, in response to this analysis. 

6. Multiple Educational Agency

Yet the education debate so often focuses solely on schools and schooling. Dewey and many others have downplayed the role of school in the development of young people. For Martin this narrow and obsessive emphasis on schools and schooling may result in cultural miseducation. Parents, family, community, church, youth groups, sports clubs, the media, internet and other institutions, even the education of animals, have played roles in education long before schools and schooling were common. Martin has an expansive view of learning as a process of Multiple Educational Agency. To focus just on schools, which are notoriously difficult to change, is to ignore the very many other opportunities to educate

7. Learning happens everywhere

Above all she reconceptualises education as something that is all-pervasive, often informal, through many agents in many different contexts. The idea that education is a fundamental aspect of life that lasts for the whole of one's life underpins her entire re-evaluation.

Criticism

Critics have claimed that her work is so general that it is difficult to either object or test. Others claim that her widening education to include, for example animals, is taking the inclusivity idea too far. Others, while agreeing with Martin’s descriptive work, have argued that Martin’s prescriptive recommendations around the reconstitution of education are either impractical, simply reinforce inequalities or replace them with new ones. Her work certainly aroused debate and passions.

Conclusion

Martin may not be regarded as the only or even leading voice of feminism in education but her reputation as a dogged researcher, determined to re-establish historical wrongs and implement future rights is unarguable. The re-evaluation of Plato, Rousseau, James, Wollstonecraft, Montessori, Beecher and Gilman is one contribution. Stimulating feminist and gender debate and research is another. Widening the view of education beyond schooling is another. Above all she reconceptualises education as something that is all-pervasive, often informal, through many agents in many different contexts. This was Martin’s great achievement, simply opening the world of education up to a much wider set of perspectives around gender, women and what it is to educate and be an educated person.

Bibliography

Martin, J. R. (1985). Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Martin, J. R. (1992). The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Martin, J. R. (1994). Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curriculum. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Martin, J. R. (2000). Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the Academy. New York: Routledge.

Martin, J. R. (2002). Cultural Miseducation: In Search of a Democratic Solution. New York: Teachers College Press.

Martin, J. R. (2011). Education Reconfigured: Routledge.

Forget 21st Century skills - revive 18th Century skills

A mantra (that has now turned into an empty trope) among educators who need a serious sounding phrase to rattle around in conferences and reports is ‘21st Century Skills’. I hear it often, almost always in some overlong, text-heavy Powerpoint presentation at an educational conference, accompanied by a cocktail of 'C' words  - collaboration, communication, creativity, critical skills. Can the real world really be that alliterative?

But does this idee fixe bear scrutiny? In a nice piece of work by Stepahnie Otttenheijm, she asked some youngsters (radical eh?) what 21st C skills they thought they’d need. Not one of the usual suspects came up. They were less vague, much bolder and far more realistic. Rather than the usual 'C' suspects and abstract nouns, they wanted to know how to handle and maintain a strong digital identity, be nice, recognise what’s learnt outside school, learn how to search, use Facebook privacy settings and so on - exceedingly practical these youngsters. My suspicion is that they know far more about this than we adults. It is schools, colleges and Universities that need to be dragged into the 21st century, not their users.
This 21st C agenda is actually quite dangerous. It can harm learners, especially the disadvantaged by giving them the illusion of progress. Knowledge and skills are not separable like oil and water, they are deeply entwined with most critical think and problem solving requiring a depth off knowledge. Willingham point's to the disastrous adoption of 'New Math', a let straight into problem solving which abandoned necessary, prior knowledge. 21st C skills promise short-cuts, short-term gains but at a heavy cost - long-term progress.

18th century skills

I'm all for abandoning this ‘21st century’ label - we're 15% into it already and education has become less interested in these skills, more academic, more test-driven, PISA obsessed and has failed to use the technology that we all use, even during the dull lectures we're still fed. Forget futurists, I want some educational archaeologists that revive 18th century enlightenment values.

Samuel Johnson said, "Lectures were once useful; but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary. If your attention fails, and you miss a part of a lecture, it is lost; you cannot go back as you do upon a book". The figures who led the charge against the religious basis of schooling and universities in the enlightenment were people like Johnson, who existed outside of the system, enjoyed unorthodox opinion and encouraged real critical thinking. As he said, "Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect".
What drove him and other enlightenment figures, like Mary Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, was a more sympathetic view of the learner but above all the basic idea of self-improvement and education as a progressive force.

David Hume, my favourite enlightenment figure, and the greatest ever English speaking philosopher, who was rejected by Edinburgh University for being an 'unbeliever', would be shocked to find that find religious studies, and not philosophy, is still taught in schools. "Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge" he claimed.
Why teach the love of a set of incompatible systems of certainty, rather than the love of critical thought, a sceptical disposition and autonomous thinking. On learning he was incredibly progressive, observing that "it is the content, not the person who matters... as you know there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in books, and there is nothing to be required in order to reap all possible advantages from them, but an order and choice in reading them...I see no reason why we should either go to a University, more than to any other place, or ever trouble ourselves about the learning or capacity of the professor."
I'd prefer young people to have the skills that keep them sceptical, critical and independent. Genuine inquiry needs that enlightenment spirit of curiosity, good analytic skills and abandonment of dogmatic positions. To be honest, I suspect they have this in abundance. Like their enlightenment forefathers they don't want to lock up knowledge in institutions but share, discuss, communicate, even hang out in coffee shops.

Collaboration and sharing

Young people communicate and collaborate every few minutes – it’s an obsession. They text, message, chat, post, comment, snapchat, whatsapp, use Instagram, Facebook and tools you're likely never to have heard of. Note the absence of email and Twitter. Then there’s Spotify, Soundcloud, Flickr, Vine, Vimeo, YouTube and Bitorrent to share, tag, upload and download experiences, comments, photographs, video and media. They also collaborate closely in teams, often international, when playing computer games. Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways. 

Then along comes someone who wants to teach them a 21st C skill, usually in a classroom, where all of this is banned. I’m hugely amused at this conceit, that we adults, especially in education, think we always have the skills we want to teach. There is no area of human endeavour that is less collaborative than education. Teaching and lecturing are largely lone-wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges and Universities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious of anything produced outside of their classroom or their institution. The culture of NIH (Not Invented Here) is endemic. Many educators far from being consistently collaborative, have a sneering attitude towards online collaboration.

Communication

Again, we live in the age of abundant communication. There’s been a renaissance in communication and writing among young people, who have become masters at smart, concise dialogue. The mobile has taken communication to new levels of use and sophistication. They know what channel to use, whether it’s archived (txts & Facebook) or not (snapchat), synchronous (realtime voice) or asynchronous (access when you want). They can also handle multiple, open channels at the same time.

What do we educators have to offer on this front? Whiteboards? Some groupwork round a table with felt-tip pens? Not one single teacher in the schools my sons attended has an email address available for parents. I’ve attended innumerable educational conferences where only a handful of the participants used Twitter.

Problem solving

Problem solving is a complex skill and there are serious techniques that you can learn to problem solve, such as breakdown, root-cause analysis, supplemented by good documentation, issues' lists, request registers and so on. If you've been through serious project management training or lived for a while in a heavyweight IT environment, where serious coding takes place, you'll meet people who are skilled at this. 

I’m not at all convinced that many subject-focused teachers and lecturers know much about these generic techniques. Problem solving for a maths teacher may be factoring equations of finding a proof but they’re the last people I’d call on to solve anything else in life. Do teachers actually know what generic problem solving is or is it seen as some skill that is acquired through osmosis when a group of kids get together in a project to make, for example, a movie?

Creativity

Beware of big, abstract nouns. This one has become a cipher for almost everything and, I fear, nothing. I have no problem with art, drama and other departments talking about creativity but why does creativity have to be injected into all subjects and education. When it comes to creativity, my own view is that the music, drama and other creative skills my own offspring have gained, have mostly been acquired outside of school. You can listen to as many Sir Ken Robinson talks as you wish, it's still a vague concept backed up with little more than his easy-going, jokey rhetoric.

Critical thinking

I have some sympathy with this one, as critical thinking is often well taught in good schools and universities, but it needs high quality teaching and the whole curriculum and system of assessment needs to adjust to this need. However, as Arun has shown, there is evidence that in our Universities, this is not happening. Arun (2011), in a study that tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students, who entered 24 four-year colleges, showed that Universities were failing badly on the three skills they studied; critical thinking, complex reasoning and communications. This research, along with similar evidence, is laid out in their book Academically Adrift.

Digital literacy

Across the world young people have collaborated on Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to bring down entire regimes and force political change. Not one of them has been on a digital literacy course. And, in any case, who are these older teachers who know enough about digital literacy to teach these young people? And how do they teach it – through collaborative, communication on media using social media – NO. By and large, in educational institutions, this stuff is shunned, restricted, even banned. We learn digital literacy by doing, largely outside of academe.

Conclusion

Beneath all this talk of 21st C skills, is not a view of autonomy and independent skills and thinking. Isn’t it just a rather old, top-down, command and control idea – that we know what’s best for them? Isn’t it just the old master-pupil model dressed up in new clothes? In this case, I suspect the pupils may know a tad more than the masters.

There’s also a brazen conceit here, that educators know, with certainty, that these are the chosen skills for the next 100 years. Are we simply fetishising the skills of the current management class? Was there a sudden break between these skills in the last century compared to this century? No. What’s changed is the need to understand the wider range of possible communication channels. This comes through mass adoption and practice, not formal education.

It is an illusion that these skills were ever, or even can be, taught at school. Teachers have enough on their plate without being given this burden. I’ve seen no evidence that teachers have the disposition, or training, to teach these skills. In fact, in universities, I’d argue that smart, highly analytic, research-driven academics tend, in my experience, often to have low skills in these areas. Formal educational environments are not the answer. Pushing rounded, sophisticated, informal skills into a square, subject-defined environment is not the answer. It’s our schools and universities, not young people, who need to be dragged into the 21st century.