What's Wrong with "Personalized Learning" and the "Skills Economy" Part 2: 21st Century Skills
In part 1 of this series, I shared about the World Bank’s online workshop series called “Blockchain for Education: Skills Economy” and how public education has been captured by NGOs and intergovernmental organizations with the purpose of implementing a unified system of education that is global, called a “digital learning ecosystem”, also called “personalized learning”. In part 2, I will explain why 21st Century Skills are used as a framework in public education today to push this agenda forward.
Anyone in education is familiar with the concept of “21st Century skills”. It’s written into practically every school’s mission statement. It’s embedded into the teaching standards. It’s included in the teacher evaluation rubrics. Parents and the general public probably aren’t aware of exactly what it is or how prevalent it is in our schools.
The Partnership for 21st century Skills Framework was developed to “help practitioners integrate skills into the teaching of core academic subjects. They developed a unified, collective vision for learning called the Framework for 21st Century Learning. It describes the skills, knowledge, and expertise students must master to succeed in work and life”. It is a “blend of content knowledge specific skills, expertise, and literacies. The essential skills for success in today’s world include learning and innovation skills (the 4 C’s): Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity(often supplemented by others including citizenship, character, compassion, and civics, life, and career skills, and information, media, and technical skills).” These “supplemented” skills are all SEL skills which I go into detail about in my article, Just Say No the SEL.
Who are these “partners” that have developed this framework? Battelle for Kids (BFK) is ”a national, not-for-profit organization with the mission of realizing the power and promise of 21st century learning for every student. We put our core values and dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion at the center of everything we do and every decision we make as we collaborate with school systems, communities, and partners to achieve our mission. Our work centers on helping education leaders engage their communities to re-envision and transform their school systems. We take a systems approach to promote enduring transformation of the system and equitable, deeper learning outcomes for every student”.
These are just some of the members of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
Notice that there are many private media and technology corporations on this list. Do we really want these parties to be in charge of developing the educational framework for America’s students? They claim to have input from teachers, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.
In the World Bank workshop series that I watched, they also shared that these 21st Century skills are necessary in order to create a high-quality skills economy that is world wide. 21st Century skills descriptors will be used to describe the qualifications. In order to do this, they want a personalized experience where people are “moving up incrementally”, which means that they will always be dependent on this system for future opportunity, and “getting reduced transaction costs as they gain skills”, which means that the more they use this system, the more beneficial to them(similar to a pyramid scheme). In the US, skills-based hiring is focused on equitable and meritocratic recruitment processes. They want to move away from qualifications to skills based hiring.
They go on to say, “Having an Open Skills Network provides a common syntax to communicate about skills in the same way, to put more of a context to the skill. The idea is to have a skills-based hiring education ecosystem with machine readable interoperable ways of defining the skill.” This is where blockchain will come in as a system to organize this infrastructure. This is how the system can be applied globally since it is interoperable. They will also give the skills an economic value in order to solve the problem of currency exchange across the globe. Below is screenshot from the workshop where this is demonstrated.
Open Skills Network is “a coalition of employers, education providers, policy makers, military, non-profits, and other stakeholders dedicated to advancing skills-based education and hiring. We envision a world where learners and workers are empowered to use their skills as currency - with the ability to understand the value of their achievements - within the employment and education marketplace.”
Here is a breakdown of what these skills are.
What is the cost of focusing half of our student’s educational goals on these soft skills? As Charlotte Iserbyte said, we are deliberately dumbing down America’s students. We are taking valuable time away from the core subjects including English Literature, Math, History, and Science in order to allow time to focus on developing these 21st Century skills. For whose benefit? For the benefit of the global corporations that will hire these “learners” and “future workers”. They don’t even call them students anymore. They are called learners because a student eventually graduates and a learner doesn't. A learner is a “life-long” learner. The skill requirements never end because that is what makes this entire system run. They are interested in developing a “human capital action plan” (see graphic below) which is the collection of data of our students for financial gain. Battelle for Kids explains this here.
They see America’s students as “human capital” to be traded in the finance market. In my opinion, the ultimate goal of all of these “stakeholders” is to create a global educational system that students are locked into in order to access financial opportunities while competing with people from all over the world for “decent work”, achieving Sustainable Goals #4 and #*8. The people who are financially benefiting from this system will be the ones running the system(corporations). America’s students will be their workers.
It is interesting that the name of their organization is a play on “battle for kids”. This is a war and we are fighting against a very large and powerful machine. The more people we have on our side, the sooner we can take back control over the American public school systems and remove these “stakeholders” from the decision making process. Please join the effort today by getting involved in the local education in your community. Some ways include researching the curriculum and financial contracts in your local community, joining the local PTA, contacting the school board, speaking at school board meetings, attending parental rights groups, or doing public records requests. There are many ways to help in the cause. We need boots on the ground for this battle. America’s future is at stake.
To read part 1 of this series, go here.
Part 3 will explore the role that 1EdTech, the Learning Economy Foundation, and the LEGO foundation is playing in the development of this digital education infrastructure.
Part 4 will explore how personalized learning is happening all over the country at the local level.