Sesame Street, Star Trek or The Six Million Dollar Man?

In a previous post, I shared that I am a Gen X'er and an immigrant to this country. I was born in India, and grew up in Canada. As a child, I was fascinated by television. I learned to speak English by watching television. What I learned on TV I could practice at school. Sesame Street and Star Trek were the two shows that really helped me. Sesame Street was fun and educational. Star Trek was entertaining and fueled my interest in the sciences. Warning, this post contains references to Gen X history. I hope you get the references.

What does all this have to do with 21st  Century Skills? Well, it's like the show The Six Million Dollar Man. If you have never seen the show, check it out on YouTube somewhere. And, if you have seen the show, you'll remember the intro to the show and the line "...we can rebuild him, we have the technology, we have the capability to build the first bionic man!". 

This is essentially how I'm starting to see 21st Century Teaching. While focusing on improving education and teaching skills that prepare students for the technological future is worthwhile and necessary, I have to ask at what cost? The plot of the show The Six Million Dollar Man was all about Steve Austin, an astronaut whose life was saved from a catastrophic accident. His life was not necessarily his. He went around like a superhero but at the bidding of the government agency that saved him. 

So with the emphasis on teaching 21st Century skills, I agree with Jay Matthews when he says, "the 21st-century skills movement seems bent on reducing a wealth of knowledge and diversity of perspectives to a simple, business-minded set of skills. This would be great, obviously, for the corporate world. But since literature, art, music -- much of what defines the human experience -- are not useful in the boardroom, they won't be given much space in our...schools.”

When you look at the framework for 21st Century skills, I all in. I buy it. I get it. However, I see these skills as not just new skills but skills that are at the root of what we as teachers should be teaching. This is not new. To go back to Jay Matthews, you have to consider who is sponsoring these skills and why are they sponsoring this initiative? What is their gain? And I'm starting to think that perhaps these corporations are the ones to gain, they're the ones that will be getting future workers. Maybe there's a conspiracy there to look at.

And, if you have ever watched Star Trek, you ever noticed that everything was focused on the Star Fleet Academy? In a sense you couldn't "go where no one had gone before" if you didn't go to Star Fleet.

Maybe it's all about which Kool-Aid we're drinking.