I am not Alfie Kohn’s biggest fan, but he deserves kudos for skewering educators’ fixation with “21st-century skills.”
Essentially, we can take whatever objectives or teaching strategies we happen to favor and, merely by attaching a label that designates a future time period, endow them (and ourselves) with an aura of novelty and significance. Better yet, we instantly define our critics as impediments to progress. If this trick works for the adjective ?21st-century,? imagine the payoff from ratcheting it up by a hundred years.
Kohn parodies the 21-century skills folk, declaring that it is time for a “22nd-century skills” movement. Very funny.
