Looks to me like 21st century skills are being (deliberately but needlessly) juxtaposed against knowledge which can be measured under NCLB. Hence, “21st century skills” as a marketing tool of the anti-accountability lobby.

To which “commentators” are you referring? I think many of us would argue that such skills (21st century, ancient, or in between) absolutely depend on knowledge. At war with knowledge? By no means.

Nor is “the need to instill these skills in many more students” new. Universal public schooling brought a dramatic increase in the student body, as did various immigration waves.

Newness does exist–but often the word “new” is used for promotional purposes. When the Soviets abandoned the project method and returned to the traditional curriculum, they referred to the latter in terms of a “revolution” and “new methods.” (See William C. Bagley, Education and Emergent Man (1934), pp. 180-182).

To distinguish the new from the not-so-new, one needs a combination of knowledge, critical thinking, and perseverance. It is one of the most demanding projects a person can undertake. I am a beginner at it.

Yet the need to instill these skills in many more students is new.

As long as commentators on 21st century skills suggest that such skills are at war with knowledge, we won’t have a very productive discussion.

Now, how many high school students have the know-how to devise a new energy policy at all, let alone in two weeks?

That’s an irritating feature of the “project method”–that students are expected to tackle “Big Questions” that they are in no position to handle. And often the teacher isn’t prepared to handle such questions, either, nor, in the minds of many educators, is that a concern.

In “The Fantasia of Current Education” (1941; published in Forgotten Heroes in American Education, ed. J. Wesley Null and Diane Ravitch, 2006), Isaac Leon Kandel discusses the “cult of superficiality” among progressives: the contempt for subject matter and the insistence that students tackle “big” questions without adequate preparation. To illustrate such thinking, he cites several sources, including a 1939 article published in School and Society:

“A teacher does not need to have studied economics in order to give a good course in the subject. All that is needed is a teacher (1) who is alert to the problems of the day; (2) who is openminded; (3) who can stimulate pupils to bring economic problems to class for discussion; (4) who permits and encourages free and open discussion of all controversial subjects; (5) who instills into the pupils a spirit of tolerance for all views and a respect for the opinions of others, and (6) who shows in all discussion that he or she has at heart the solution of the economic ills of the day in a way which will restore prosperity and happiness to the whole people.”

Pretty similar to the 21st-century skills of today, only today we’ve got the technology to deliver the ignorant bliss with much greater speed.

I’m not sure that giving middle schoolers iTouch’s helps with either of those, but I do think that high schools, and perhaps middle schools, want to give students consistent access to computers. I’d say that having the library and computers available after school hours to students who didn’t have computers at home was more important than giving students their own laptop or iTouch.