Firms push Google-era learning

THE pre-eminence of traditional school subjects over "21st-century skills" has been supported by the custodian of the national curriculum.

THE pre-eminence of traditional subjects is supported by the custodian of the national curriculum, who says the push for "21st-century skills" has come from industry, concerned that school-leavers aren't ready for the workplace.

Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority chairman Barry McGaw said yesterday learning skills depended on extensive knowledge of the relevant subject, so the traditional disciplines had to be central.

"The curriculum needs to give a strong place to disciplines of knowledge, as the Australian curriculum does, on the grounds that expertise depends on deep knowledge of the relevant domain and that transfer of learning and skills across domains is weak and limited," he said.

"You can't focus on these skills decontextualised from their fields of knowledge. I don't, however, deny the importance of young people developing what we call general capabilities in the Australian curriculum, such as personal and interpersonal skills."

Professor McGaw was responding to comments, reported in The Australian yesterday, by one of the nation's most senior education officials, Tom Alegounarias, rejecting the view that the advent of the internet meant schools no longer had to teach facts because students could Google them. Mr Alegounarias, an ACARA board member and president of the NSW Board of Studies, said generic skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity could only be learnt in the context of a field of knowledge.

The Australian curriculum includes seven "general capabilities", described as "essential skills for 21st-century learners in literacy, numeracy, information and communication technology, thinking, creativity, teamwork and communication".

The curriculum is described as three-dimensional because, while organised around traditional subjects, it can be reorganised according to the general capabilities or the three cross-curriculum priorities: indigenous cultures, Asia and sustainability.

Professor McGaw, who was the leader of an international research team on teaching and assessing 21st-century skills, yesterday supported Mr Alegounarias's view.

He said a focus on 21st-century skills had been pushed more by business and industry than the education sector over the past 20 years. The involvement of business had been distracting, leading to an over-emphasis on generic skills and risking the specific knowledge required in a job such as engineering or accounting becoming lost in the debate.

In a speech prepared for an education conference in Oman this month, Professor McGaw says the Australian curriculum pays "serious attention" to 21st-century skills, but does not use that term "because the skills are not unique to the 21st century".

Professor McGaw said the national curriculum paid serious attention to the traditional disciplines because ACARA "did not presume to overturn several millennia of thinking about the nature of knowledge", recognising that multidisciplinary approaches emerged from the work of people with deep disciplinary understanding to begin with.