Century Global Competency

1. The case for 21st-century learning
Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education Directorate
Anyone wondering why knowledge and skills are important to the future of our economies should
consider two facts.
First, jobs: employment rates are higher among people with more education than among those
with less. This has continued to be the case during the crisis. Also, in those OECD countries
where college education has expanded most over recent decades, learning differentials for
college graduates have continued to rise compared with school leavers, for instance. Their pay
did not decrease, unlike that of low-skilled workers. So from a jobs perspective, it pays to study.
This is a good, concrete argument for skilling up. But the case for 21st century learning goes
deeper than this and is more abstract. It is about how knowledge is generated and applied, about
shifts in ways of doing business, of managing the workplace or linking producers and consumers,
and becoming quite a different student from the kind that dominated the 20th century. What we
learn, the way we learn it, and how we are taught is changing. This has implications for schools
and higher level education, as well as for lifelong learning.
For most of the last century, the widespread belief among policymakers was that you had to get
the basics right in education before you could turn to broader skills. It's as though schools needed
to be boring and dominated by rote learning before deeper, more invigorating learning could
flourish.
Those that hold on to this view should not be surprised if students lose interest or drop out of
schools because they cannot relate what is going on in school to their real lives.
If you were running a supermarket instead of a school and saw that 30 out of 100 customers
each day left your shop without buying anything, you would think about changing your
inventory. But that does not happen easily in schools because of deeply rooted, even if
scientifically unsupported, beliefs that learning can only occur in a particular way.
In 2010, the world is now more indifferent to tradition and past reputations of educational
establishments. It is unforgiving to frailty and ignorant of custom or practice.
We live in a fast-changing world, and producing more of the same knowledge and skills will not
suffice to address the challenges of the future. A generation ago, teachers could expect that what
they taught would last their students a lifetime. Today, because of rapid economic and social
change, schools have to prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, technologies
that have not yet been invented and problems that we don't yet know will arise.
Think back 50 years: could educators then have predicted how the Internet, which emerged
globally in 1994, or the mobile phone, which appeared a few years later, would change the

2. world? These technologies have not just become tools of learning, but networking and
knowledge sharing, as well as innovation and entrepreneurship.
How do we foster motivated, dedicated learners and prepare them to overcome the unforeseen
challenges of tomorrow? The dilemma for educators is that routine cognitive skills, the skills that
are easiest to teach and easiest to test, are also the skills that are easiest to digitize, automate or
outsource. There is no question that state-of-the-art skills in particular disciplines will always
remain important. However, educational success is no longer about reproducing content
knowledge, but about extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge to novel
situations.
Education today is much more about ways of thinking which involve creative and critical
approaches to problem-solving and decision-making. It is also about ways of working, including
communication and collaboration, as well as the tools they require, such as the capacity to
recognise and exploit the potential of new technologies, or indeed, to avert their risks. And last
but not least, education is about the capacity to live in a multi-faceted world as an active and
engaged citizen. These citizens influence what they want to learn and how they want to learn it,
and it is this that shapes the role of educators.
Conventionally, our approach to problems was to break them down into manageable bits and
pieces, confined to narrow disciplines, and then to teach students the techniques to solve them.
Today, however, knowledge advances by synthesizing these disparate bits. It demands open-
mindedness, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated and becoming
familiar with knowledge in other fields. The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded in 2010, for
instance, to two UK scientists for their discovery of graphene, a new material with
groundbreaking properties and potential applications. Known for their playful approach to
physics, the two researchers' breakthrough came from a 2004 experiment involving a block of
carbon and some scotch tape.
If we spend our whole lives in the silo of a single discipline, we cannot develop the imaginative
skills to connect the dots or to anticipate where the next invention, and probable source of
economic value, will come from. Yet most countries, with the possible exception of the Nordic
countries, provide few incentives for students to learn and teachers to teach across disciplines.
Traditionally, you could tell students to look into an encyclopaedia when they needed
information, and you could tell them that they could generally rely on what they found to be true.
But today, literacy is about managing non-linear information structures. Consider the Internet.
The more content knowledge we can search and access on the web, the more important the
capacity to make sense out of this content becomes. This involves interpreting the frequently
conflicting pieces of information that pop up on the web and assessing their value, a skill
rendered essential by the appearance of the Internet.
Rather than just learning to read, 21st century literacy is about reading to learn and developing
the capacity and motivation to identify, understand, interpret, create and communicate

3. knowledge. Only a few countries promote such a broad concept of literacy in their instructional
practices and assessments, but more will surely follow.
Another changing tradition is for students to learn on their own and be tested at the end of the
school year on what they have learned. The more interdependent the world becomes, the more
collaborators and orchestrators must step in. Innovation in particular is the outcome of how we
mobilise, share and link knowledge.
The knowledge world is no longer divided between specialists and generalists. A new group-
let's call them “versatilists”-has emerged. They apply depth of skill to a progressively widening
scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships and
assuming new roles. They are capable not only of constantly adapting, but also constantly
learning and growing in a fast-changing world. In a flat world, our knowledge becomes a
commodity available to everyone else. As columnist and author Thomas Friedman puts it,
because technology has enabled us to act on our imaginations in ways that we could never before,
the most important competition is no longer between countries or companies but between
ourselves and our imagination.
Value is less and less created vertically through command and control-as in the classic “teacher
instructs student” relationship-but horizontally, by whom you connect and work with, whether
online or in person. In other words, we are seeing a shift from a world of stocks, where
knowledge is stored up but not exploited, and so depreciates rapidly, to a world of flows, where
knowledge is energised and enriched by the power of communication and constant collaboration.
This will become the norm. Barriers will continue to fall as skilled people appreciate, and build
on, different values, beliefs and cultures.
Success will go to those individuals and countries that are swift to adapt, slow to resist and open
to change. The task for educators and policymakers is to help countries rise to this challenge.

4. New knowledge, new know-how: skills for the
21st Century
Knowledge is becoming increasingly important in our economies and Society at large, to the
extent that a new expression has been coined to baptize this new development phase: the
knowledge-based economy. Characterized by the growing contribution of production,
dissemination and uses made of knowledge (intangible or immaterial capital) to the
competitiveness of enterprises and nations, the knowledge-based economy calls for future
citizens and workers to be taught a renewed set of skills, differing partly from those developed
during the industrial era.
Several international organizations have set about defining this new set of knowledge and know-
how on which our educational systems should concentrate to train future generations to meet the
needs of a knowledge-based economy. These are the so-called “Skills for the 21st Century.”
Several points are common to the investigations made by the OECD, by the ATC21 group of
international experts or by the American organization P21, enabling identification of three main
blocks: generic learning skills, innovation-oriented skills and collaborative skills.
Facing up to the IT revolution
The first block corresponds to our need to know how to manoeuver in an ICT world. Prof.
Dominique Foray, professor at Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, emphasizes that we must be
aware of the extent to which abundant, current information availability represents a truly
revolutionary change. “Without going back to antediluvian times, we need only recall how
difficult it was for people to obtain and access ‘instruments of knowledge.’ Gerbert d’Aurillac, a
renowned intellectual, Pope of the 11th Century, had a personal library with no more than 20
works,” he recalls.
To manage this incommensurable mass of data and knowledge set free by ICTs, it is of prime
importance to know how we should seek information sources, to select and sort them, to assess
and organize the information rapidly and efficiently, in a framework called information literacy.
And, given that accessed data can vary considerably in terms of quality, web-surfers must be
able to distinguish, among the sources, those that are most reliable and guaranteed safe. Hence
the importance of seeing pupils develop a critical and analytical mind. The objective will then no
longer be just to know stricto sensu where to look, analyze and criticize knowledge sources; or,
to reframe this, as Montaigne once wrote in the 16th Century, a child should have “a preceptor
with a well-formed mind rather than a well-filled intellect” (The Essays, Book I, Chapter XXV).
This is all the truer nowadays when business sectors and jobs are evolving very rapidly, to the
point that we do not know what young people today will need in a few years’ time, in terms of
knowledge and know-how, to correctly exercise their professions. The fact is that ICTs, over and
above freeing access to knowledge, accelerate the changes we can observe in the economies and
Society, to the point that both the enterprises and the personnel must continuously renew their
skills. It has become primordial to know how to adapt to these rapid changes and consequently to

5. develop skills applicable to constantly evolving situations. “In a knowledge-based economy,
learning is a life-long process” which provides for “added value for generic learning skills in
contrast with mastering a specific list of technical skills,” summarizes Dominque Foray.
Once the relevant information and knowledge content have been identified, we must be capable
of analyzing and transforming them to become new knowledge. As was noted in the OECD
report (op.cit.), information has changed status, from source to product, leading to new
knowledge and ideas. This requisite block of skills is based on the capacity to innovate, to create
and to solve problems. Creativity occupies a key position, innovation being the key to a
knowledge based economy. For the entrepreneurial world, creating and developing an
innovation-intensive culture is crucial to success if the companies wish to preserve their
competitiveness and indeed survive.
The creativity challenge
“Our system in France, our organization, the way we think, do not sufficiently encourage
creativity, confidence, agility, interdisciplinarity or having an open view in the world” regrets
Geneviève Fioraso, French Minister for Higher Education and Research (02/07/14, in La
Tribune). These observations could be extended to many other countries and are singled out
regularly by Sir Ken Robinson, a British academic recognized everywhere for his proposals to
develop creativity in education and enterprise. It was moreover no small event that the TED
lecture most seen in the world is one of his, entitled “How schools kill creativity”: no less than
30 million people have listened to this expert explaining, at TED2006, how our school systems
today inhibit rather than stimulate creativity.
In his bestseller The Element Ken Robinson explains that “being creative is about making fresh
connections so that we see things in new ways and from different perspectives.” Does everyone
possess this faculty to be creative? Sir Ken replied, without hesitation, ‘yes,’ thereby tackling the
myth according whereby only a few people have the gift of creativity. As he sees it, we all
possess a considerable potential to create when we are born and indeed, creativity ought to be
seen as comparable to reading and writing: all we have to do is learn and develop the skill. It is
obvious that our school systems do not enable creative thought to blossom; on the contrary, they
tend to stifle it and the reason lies in the ad-mass features inherited from a school organization
established two centuries ago to meet the needs of an economic model based on industrialization.
As Salman Khan, founder of theKhan Academy (a non-profit making charity providing free on-
line access to highest quality teaching for anyone round the world) emphasizes, “the burden of
that school model has become increasingly clear in our modern era, now that States no longer
need a docile, disciplined working class able only to read, write and count, but more creative and
curious workers, citizens involved in life-long learning with the capacity to come up with and
implement new ideas.”
Various paths have been proposed by experts to remedy the problem of creativity development in
schools. One consists of making schools notably more personalized, so that every pupil can
discover his/her priority element and blossom. For Sir Ken, this calls for refusing any hierarchy
among the subjects taught and accepting that science, sports and artistic work should be viewed
on the same level. Salman Khan defends an idea which, at first sight, may appear far-fetched,

6. that of setting up large classes, each with several teachers and children of mixed age groups, thus
enabling them to work in small, groups that vary according to the subject studied and to the
group’s needs, on a time-scale no longer measured in terms of hours nor by course subject. This
would notably provide a way to develop collaborative skills and living in Society, the older
pupils looking after the younger for certain activities. French biologist François Taddei
advocates development of a question-intensive culture, with experimentations, too often absent
from our classrooms where pupils become more passive than active.
Developing a culture like this requires that the learners be not afraid to fail. There is nothing
worse than this fear to paralyze one’s mind. If you want to discover new ideas, you must be
prepared to take risks and to make mistakes. Ken Robinson often repeats his belief that “if you
are not ready to make mistakes, you will never discover anything original.” Unfortunately,
current school systems tend to “punish” failure. It is obvious that – without rejecting outright all
forms of assessment – they do not contribute to reassuring pupils that failing is acceptable and
even necessary to the creative process. In the same vein, schools today do not value differences.
In many instances, there is only one right answer to a question, whereas a creative approach
enables students to propose new answers to a given problem, seen from a totally different angle
or point of view. Conformity must be abandoned and intellectual curiosity stimulated.
Navigating among knowledge spheres
This is why those who advocate a school structure capable of developing creative, innovative
and problem-solving capacities call for more interdisciplinarity. Prof. Eric Richard Kandel,
American neuropsychiatrist, Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology or Medicine (2000) for his work
on the physiology of memory storage, demonstrated that the process of memorizing information
needs to be associated with previously information well-imbedded in our memory. This led
Salman Khan to asserting that efficient teaching must concentrate on the associative chain that
inter-connects subjects in an inter-disciplinary manner. The founder of the Khan Academy
deplores that genetics are taught in a biology course and probabilities in mathematics, whereas
the former are a direct application of the second or that algebra is separated from physical
analysis whereas it derives from physics. Separating disciplines at school is deemed “artificial”
and “arbitrary.” Schools must learn how to navigate among the various existing spheres of
knowledge.
The digital revolution, in this light, appears as a possible source of improvement. To quote the
authors of Le numérique, une chance pour l'École [The digital world, an opportunity for schools]
“faced with the traditional school curriculum where encyclopedic accumulation of knowledge
continues to be the dominant learning/teaching mode, where knowledge content continues to be
organized in rigid blocks, the digital world appears as one of the ways we have to progress
towards redefining the school programmes in a way better adapted to contemporary knowledge,
know-how and skills, with a less boxed-in organization, more open to forms of collective
intelligence.” In higher educational spheres, we have already observed that the MOOCs (Massive
Open Online Courses) encourage collaborative learning modes where the professors and
lecturers assume the role of facilitators rather than experts handing down academic knowledge.

7. This constitutes the third stage of the process: information, once sorted and selected, can be used
to produce new information and provide more efficient solutions to problems if the process is
carried out in a collaborative mode. In a knowledge-based economy, success stems not only from
isolated individuals but also from work communities and networking. When individuals’ skills
are aggregated, each member bringing his/her own sets of knowledge, of thought patterns and
forms of intelligence, the end result is a higher level of creation. This is what Sir Ken Robinson
calls “the alchemy of synergy”, i.e., an association of creative energies and the will to do the best
one can to keep up with the peers, which in turn makes each participant surpass him(her)self. “In
all domains, there have been powerful groupings of people who have driven innovation through
their influence on each other and the impetus they’ve created as a group”, adds the expert
Robinson. It is precisely this sort of alchemy that Silicon Valley or Sandbox are looking for – the
latter being a focal site for ultra-creative young people that exist in every domain and have their
origins all round the world.
François Taddei, director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre, Paris (CRI), interviewed
recently by ParisTech Review, considers it primordial to learn how to work in collaborative
projects as early as possible. School should be the place where children learn the third block of
skills needed for an “honest man” in the 21st Century, as we shall see in other sequels of this
PTR series on Education.

8. What is Global Competence?
The idea of global competence articulates the knowledge and skills students need in the 21st
century.
Globally competent students have the knowledge and skills to:
Investigatethe World
Globally competent students are aware, curious, and interested in learning about the world and
how it works.
RecognizePerspectives
Globally competent students recognize that they have a particular perspective, and that others
may or may not share it.
CommunicateIdeas
Globally competent students can effectively communicate, verbally and non-verbally, with
diverse audiences.
TakeAction
Globally competent students have the skills and knowledge to not just learn about the world, but
also to make a difference in the world.

9. The Four Domains of Global Competence