First, it is worth clarifying what is meant by the phrase“twenty-first-century education.”A report
issued in 2009 by the Education Directorate of the OECD states:
Developments in society and economy require that educational systems equip young people
with new skills and competencies, which allow them to benefit from the emerging new forms
of socialization and to contribute actively to economic development under a system where the
main asset is knowledge. These skills and competencies are often referred to as 21st century
skills and competencies, to indicate that they are more related to the needs of the emerging
models of economic and social development than with those of the past century, which were
suited to an industrial mode of production.^5Learning conditions have so significantly changed in the twenty-first century, the argument goes,
that the education systems built in the twentieth century are no longer adequate to meet the con-
temporary learner’s needs. Noticeably the learners and their natural needs–needs and potentials
that may remain fairly consistent across generations–should not guide educational policy and
pedagogy. Rather, the OECD report assumes that when external conditions change, so too must the
entire project of education, including its ends and goals.
The OECD report also implies that one of the most relevant changes in this century is the
widespread acknowledgment among educational theorists that knowledge is constructed.
According to Krahenbuhl:
The philosophy of constructivist pedagogy has dominated the fields of teaching and learning
for nearly the entire twenty-first century:::. Constructivism:::is an epistemological view of
knowledge that argues knowledge is derived in a meaning-making process through which
learners construct individual interpretations of their experiences and thus, construct meaning
in their minds. This is considered opposed to objectivism which suggests that truth exists
independently of the learner and is transferred when encountered in a meaningful way.^6Several Canadian provincial governments, such as those in Alberta and British Columbia (BC),
have adopted the language of twenty-first-century education at the policy level and are imple-
menting the new curricula to bring their school systems into line with the OECD report. BC’s
Ministry of Education website, for example, alerts parents that schools will now begin to place less
emphasis on learning facts and greater emphasis on high order conceptual learning. It will
encourage students to pursue their passions by developing personal learning initiatives:“The deep
understanding and application of knowledge is at the center of the new model, as opposed to the
memory and recall of facts that previously shaped education around the globe for many decades.”^7
Alberta’s“transformative”education plan was introduced in 2010.^8 These twenty-first-century
approaches to education have several names:“discovery-learning”or“independent inquiry”or
even“experiential learning,”though they often seem to be interchangeable, or at minimum, they
flow from the same perspective about knowledge as a“meaning-making”rather than truth-
discovering endeavor.^9
Along with the claim that knowledge is widely regarded as a sociocultural creation, at least as far
as educational thought leaders are concerned, it is sometimes added that the sheer pace of economic
and technical change demands this new approach to education. Whereas schools are reportedly still
adhering to a model of education the foundations for which were laid at the end of the nineteenth
century, businesses today are demanding skills and competencies that will prepare students to enter
into the new knowledge economy:“The task is not to do better now what we set out to do then: it is
to rethink the purposes, methods and scale of education in our new circumstances.”^10 According to
its advocates, the new education is similar to the old education in one important respect, however:
both are, or ought to be, preoccupied with training students to become productive participants in the
82 David W. Livingstone