Are We Learning Skills that Matter?

The Educational Leadership article, Rigor Redefined, by Tony Wagner, published in October of 2008, refers to the issue of whether schools are teaching students the skills they will need for their future careers and to be good citizens. Tony Wagner set out on a mission to find what a variety of businesses look for in their employees. Teamwork, engaging in good discussions, asking good questions, and mastering “the seven survival skills” were the most common answers. Then, Tony Wagner went and observed schools to see if they are teaching these skills and he found the results were that they were not.

I think most of what we learn is still important and definitely needed. Sure, there are some skills that schools are not teaching what they should, but we are still learning. The first of the seven survival skills is critical thinking and problem solving, which involves asking good questions. We practice that often because many of the papers we write in English are about questioning what we think. Another skill is collaboration and leadership, which involve technology, conference calls, web casts, and net meetings. My school has taught us nothing about those, except for blogs and Google gadgets. Initiative and entrepreneurialism, and effective oral & written communication are two more skills. At the beginning of each year in elementary school, we had to make a goal for ourselves to reach by the end of the year, and throughout all of my school years, we have worked on our communicating skills; we did verbal and written presentations. Through intense note taking, we also worked on another skill of accessing & analyzing information.