This is an article from Issue #1 of the Mind Mission Ezine – a quarterly email magazine about Mind Missions, Creative Problem Solving, and 21st Century Skills. If you’d like to subscribe, click here.
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Change is Needed for a Changing World
The Lemelson-MIT Program conducted a workshop in 2003 to explore changes in our society and corresponding needs for our educational system. The group found that our current educational system is aimed at a fulfilling “industrial” needs for a particular skill set. American schools are excellent at helping students to attain deep technical knowledge. We excel at producing learned and well-trained doctors, lawyers, and engineers. However, the world is changing.
Today’s economy is driven by change and innovation. Our ability to compete depends upon our ability to nurture thinkers and creators for the future. We must teach our students to work together, to collaboratively solve problems. We must nurture creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism in today’s students for the future of our economy. We must teach them to innovate to effectively face the challenges that they will encounter in the workplace and society.
The educational system must change to accommodate the needs of the changing world. Tony Wagoner of Harvard University cites the skills that 21st century graduates must have. They are:
- - Critical thinking and judgment
- - Solving complex, multidisciplinary, open-ended problems
- - Creativity and entrepreneurial thinking
- - Communicating and collaborating
- - Innovative use of knowledge, information, and opportunities
- - Taking charge of financial, health and civic responsibilities
The Lemelson-MIT workshop concurred with Mr. Wagoner. They found that our current K-12 educational system is not focused on inventiveness as a goal. They concluded that “inventive creativity should be made an explicit goal of education at all levels for overwhelmingly important societal reasons.”
