Who is helping your child learn?

I have been hearing a lot recently about the type of skills people need in the 21st Century and how important it is that schools help children develop these skills. These 21st Century skills are the skills that will help a student get a good job and contribute to society.

There is a lot of discussion about what these skills actually are, and there does not seem to be a definitive list that teachers can refer to. Everyone seems to have their own list depending on their vision of the future.

Stephen Downes in his blog ‘Half an Hour’ gives the best definition I have read. He calls these skills an ‘operating system for the mind’. He says that they are the skills that help people make use of all the facts in their heads in a way that makes them relevant and useful and helps them become autonomous individuals, capable of making their own decisions and directing their own lives.

He then argues that schools are too busy filling children’s heads with facts to help them develop these 21st Century skills, skills that will help them succeed in life.

It is an interesting argument, and one that many people would agree with. But I think that there is a more fundamental discussion that needs to take place.

I agree that schools should be helping children develop the skills they need to go out and earn a good living and have a successful life, but that is not enough. Schools are about learning, learning facts as well as skills, and learning does not just happen on its own. Children need to know HOW to learn.

Few teachers really understand how children learn. Teachers are very good at teaching, presenting information in different ways and hoping that children will find a way of understanding what they are teaching. Good teachers will help children by going over information in many different ways until a child has understood it. More often than not the child is expected to know how to make sense of the lesson on his own.

Children are very bright. They seem to pick up learning strategies even when they are not taught them directly. They may not learn all the strategies they need, and this will impact their learning, but on the whole children seem to learn how to learn quite well without actually being taught how to learn.

This brings me back to the idea of 21st century skills. If schools are going to be expected to teach children the skills they need to prosper in the emerging digital world – and I think that they should- then why are they not expected to help children develop the skills they need to become good learners?

And if teachers are not able to help children learn how to learn then who will?