Kilpatrick urged that boys and girls engage in hands-on projects of their own choosing. As Kilpatrick envisioned it, the project was “whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment.” Kilpatrick said that the project shaped character and personality. It required activity, not docility. It awakened student motivation. Ideally, the project would be done collaboratively by a group.

Another forerunner to the 21st-century-skills movement was the activity movement of the 1920s and 1930s. As in the Project Method, students were encouraged to engage in activities and projects built on their interests. Studies were interdisciplinary, and academic subjects were called upon only when needed to solve a problem. Students built, measured, and gured things out, while solving real-life problems like how to build a playhouse or a pet park or a puppet theater. Decision making, critical thinking, cooperative group learning: all were integral parts of the activity movement.

Something similar happened in many high schools in the 1930s, where many avant-garde school districts replaced courses like science and history with interdisciplinary courses, which they called the “core curriculum” or “social living.” Some districts merged several disciplines— such as English, social studies, and science— into a single course, which was focused not on subject matter but on students’ life experiences. In a typical class, students studied their own homes, made maps and scale drawings, and analyzed such questions as the cost of maintaining the home; the cost of fuel, light, and power; and how to prepare nutritious meals.

But there were occasional parent protests. In Roslyn, New York, parents were incensed because their children couldn’t read but spent an entire day baking nut bread. The Roslyn superintendent assured them that baking nut bread was an excellent way to learn mathematics.

In the 1950s came the Life Adjustment Movement, yet another stab at getting rid of subject matter and teaching students to prepare for real life. And in the 1980s, there was Outcome-Based Education, which sought to make schooling relevant, hands-on, and attuned to the alleged real interests and needs of young people.

The early 1990s brought SCANS—the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills—which recommended exactly the kinds of functional skills that are now called 21st-century skills. These documents were produced by a commis- sion for the U.S. Secretary of Labor. I recall hearing the director of SCANS say that students didn’t need to know anything about the Civil War or how to write a book report; these were obsolete kinds of knowledge and skills.
When the SCANS recommendations appeared in 1991, I was an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and I discussed them with David Kearns, the deputy secretary who had been CEO of Xerox. I said, “David, the SCANS report says that young people don’t need to know how to write a book report, they need to know how to write advertising jingles.” He replied, “That’s ridiculous. You can’t write advertising jingles if you don’t know how to write a book report.”

Each of these initiatives had an impact. They left American education with a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter. “It’s academic” came to mean “it’s purely theoretical and unreal.” For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.

One of the problems with skills-driven approaches to learning is that there are so many things we need to know that cannot be learned through hands-on experiences. The educated person learns not only from his or her own experience, but from the hard- earned experience of others. We do not restart the world anew in each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to see beyond our own immediate experience. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the learned capacity to understand the lessons of history, to engage in the adventures of literature, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them. Through literature, for example, we have the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of other people, to walk in their shoes, to experience life as it was lived in another century and another culture, to live vicariously beyond the bounds of our own time and family and place. What a gift! How sad to refuse it. ☐