Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

UNESCO’s current concern for promoting sustainable development through
education, based on a broad vision of peace, equity and global citizenship, can
be traced back at least as far as the 1972 report, Learning to Be: The world of
education today and tomorrow. Attempts to challenge the instrumentalist
assumptions underlying dominant approaches to curriculum development have
long been associated with a parallel debate on the nature of learning and its
relationship to schooling for the young (Bruner, 1986). Research on learning in
the behaviourist paradigm helped this debate to move beyond arguments over
the significance of nature versus nurture, but also contributed to privileging the
predictable and measurable aspects of learning over its creative aspects.
The discourse of ‘competencies’ represents the latest attempt at formulating
objectives so as to make education more purposive and efficient. As defined by the
OECD (2005, 2016a), the notion of ‘competency’ encompasses knowledge, skills,
attitudes and values. The OECD groups the competencies it regards as essential
for life in our ‘globalized’ world into three broad categories: technological, social
and individual. These are intended to provide a framework for clarifying the goals
of learning, thereby rendering the work of the teacher more transparent and
predictable. But despite the apparent novelty of this approach, we have been here
before. Stenhouse (1975) pointed out that the creative element in education, and
in the act of teaching, inevitably introduces an element of unpredictability into
its outcomes. Instrumentalist views of education, however, tend to insist that
curriculum and teaching should be organised around fully measurable outcomes;
as McKinsey’s in-house motto has it, ‘everything can be measured, and what gets
measured gets managed’ (cited in Morris, 2016, p. 9). Our study demonstrates
the dominance of this view across Asia.
But this managerialist conception of schooling
implies a negation of teachers’ agency and autonomy,
while narrowing the definition of learning to the
acquisition of isolated competencies and skills. The
findings of this study suggest that outcomes-driven
policies are fueling a growing tendency to hand prescripted
curricula to teachers, thereby diminishing
their agency in the classroom. The concomitant of
this denial of teacher autonomy is a robotic view
of the child. The core competency model envisages
training the young to successfully negotiate the
world as it exists, rather than empowering them
to imagine and shape a better world. So dominant
has the terminology of ‘competencies’ become in
international discourse on education policy, that
UNESCO itself has adopted it in its attempts to
promote ESD and GCED.
For the potential of
schooling to promote
peace, sustainable
development and global
citizenship to be fully
realised, curriculum
policies, textbooks and
pedagogic practice
must be grounded in
an understanding of
the importance of the
teacher’s freedom and
capacity to contextualise
knowledge in a manner
appropriate to the
child’s milieu
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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