Education In The 21st Century

Shift happens: Emerging technologies and globalization have resulted in political, social and cultural changes. These changes have a profound impact on all aspects of human life, including education. Yet while society has changed and continues to change, schools are slow to keep up. This book explores issues related to transforming and modernizing our educational systems, including the impact of societal shifts on education, the efforts at various levels to bring schools into the 21st century, the identification of 21st century skills, the reformation of the curriculum, the creation of alternative models of schooling, the innovative use of technology in education, and many others. It addresses questions like the following: Should schools systems adapt to better meet the needs of tomorrow’s world and how should this be accomplished? How can society better prepare students for a changing and challenging modern world? What skills do students need to lead successful lives and become productive citizens in the 21st century? How can educators create learning environments that are relevant and meaningful for digital natives? How can the school curriculum be made more rigorous to meet the needs of the 21st century? This book encourages readers to transcend the limits of their own educational experience, to think beyond familiar notions of schooling, instruction and curriculum, to consider how to best structure learning so that it will benefit future generations. It encourages a deeper analysis of the existing education system and offers practical insights into future directions focused on preparing students with 21st century skills.

CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition. The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." These messages are hitting home: majors like English and history, once very popular and highly respected, are in steep decline. "I get it," writes Fareed Zakaria, recalling the atmosphere in India where he grew up, which was even more obsessed with getting a skills-based education. However, the CNN host and best-selling author explains why this widely held view is mistaken and shortsighted. Zakaria eloquently expounds on the virtues of a liberal arts education—how to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly, and how to think analytically. He turns our leaders' vocational argument on its head. American routine manufacturing jobs continue to get automated or outsourced, and specific vocational knowledge is often outdated within a few years. Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning—precisely the gifts of a liberal education. Zakaria argues that technology is transforming education, opening up access to the best courses and classes in a vast variety of subjects for millions around the world. We are at the dawn of the greatest expansion of the idea of a liberal education in human history.

This book describes how different nations have defined the core competencies and skills that young people will need in order to thrive in the twenty-first-century, and how those nations have fashioned educational policies and curricula meant to promote those skills. The book examines six countries—Chile, China, India, Mexico, Singapore, and the United States—exploring how each one defines, supports, and cultivates those competencies that students will need in order to succeed in the current century. Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century appears at a time of heightened attention to comparative studies of national education systems, and to international student assessments such as those that have come out of PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment), led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This book’s crucial contribution to the burgeoning field of international education arises out of its special attention to first principles—and thus to first questions: As Reimers and Chung explain, “much can be gained by an explicit investigation of the intended purposes of education, in what they attempt to teach students, and in the related questions of why those purposes and how they are achieved.” These questions are crucial to education practice and reform at a time when educators (and the students they serve) face unique, pressing challenges. The book’s detailed attention to such questions signals its indispensable value for policy makers, scholars, and education leaders today.

This book focuses on current trends, potential challenges and further developments of teacher education and professional development from a theoretical, empirical and practical point of view. It intends to provide valuable and fresh insights from research studies and examples of best practices from Europe and all over the world. The authors deal with the strengths and limitations of different models, strategies, approaches and policies related to teacher education and professional development in and for changing times (digitization, multiculturalism, pressure to perform).

Schools and Food Education in the 21st Century examines how schools enact food policy, and through doing so, craft diverse foodscapes that create very different food experiences in schools. The school food policy discourse is made up of an amalgamation of discourses on obesity prevention, nutrition education, welfarism and foodieness. Whilst schools endeavor to enact policy in a variety of ways, this book shows how foodieness is taken up, and can only be taken up differently, in different schools. The book’s unique contribution is to identify the discourse of foodieness and to show how this discourse, whilst seemingly universal, is actually situated in middle-class ideas and is therefore more easily taken up by certain schools. The book argues that the classed nature of foodieness leads to certain food knowledges becoming marginalized or lost and this then positions some schools in tension with their local communities, resulting in widely variant food experiences for children. Earl demonstrates how foodieness is taken up in schools by first exploring how the foodscape at school is shaped by policy and media sources. The book then examines how foodieness is taken up by schools with different SES profiles by showing how food moves through the school day. Asking critical questions on class and poverty that are often overlooked, this book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students working on food issues related to teaching, food, policy and schools in the fields of education, sociology and food studies. It should also be of interest to policymakers, parents and teachers.

This new edition explores current issues of central importance to the academy: leadership, accountability, access, finance, technology, academic freedom, the canon, governance, and race. Chapters also deal with key constituencies -- students and faculty -- in the context of a changing academic environment.

First published in 1993, Education for the Twenty-First Century grew out of a common and deep-seated concern about the way young people think of their own future, and about some of the relatively simplistic education reforms advocated, often by people with scant comprehension of modern educational practices. Schools as institutions, schooling patterns, the curriculum and teachers themselves have come under heavy criticism, but it has to be recognized that the problems in education have no lasting or satisfactory solutions while schools continue to operate out of the framework which has determined their raison d’être for the past two hundred years. The authors argue that schools do not need fine tuning, or more of the same; rather some of the fundamental assumptions about schooling have to be revised. They argue that learning about the future must become very much a part of the present, and they set out in the book some of the thinking and several techniques which permit us to confront the future and make it a more friendly place. The book will be of interest to students, teachers and policymakers.

What counterintuitive lessons can we learn from the meteoric rise of Mindset Theory in education? Why have computers so overwhelmingly failed to become the academic panacea many expected them to be? How can the simple act of assigning grades drive student narcissism and damage teacher professionalism? In this book, brain and behavioural research is combined with respected philosophy in order to place ten widely accepted yet rarely examined aspects of education under the microscope. - Teacher Expertise - Evidence-Based Practice - Grading - Homework - Mindset - 21st Century Skills - Computers - Rewards - Daily Organization - Function This book aims to inspire teachers, leaders, and parents to question many commonly held beliefs and empower them to re-think the role of modern schooling.