Too often, when we talk about the kind of curriculum we want, we tend to think in terms of the high stakes examinations that the students will be sitting for. This is perhaps quite natural because, high stakes examinations, like the GCE, IGCSE and IB, are usually well-known and perhaps give academic credibility to the students and schools concerned. They also come with fixed curricula which means that the schools would not have to design a curriculum from scratch. That alone is a major factor perhaps because schools choose the road to high stakes examinations because it is a relatively quick way to “excellence”.

Schools in Indonesia have been heading in this direction. As a Jakarta Post report said, the sharp decline in the value of the rupiah have meant that Indonesian parents, who would have otherwise sent their young charges overseas, now prefer sending them to the mushrooming number of international schools in Indonesia. Many of these schools rely on high stakes examinations to give them academic credibility.

However, whether high stakes examinations can actually lead to excellence is open to debate (see here, here and here for examples of the debate over high stakes examinations). I will not be debating the merits or otherwise of high stakes examinations. What is more important perhaps is too see what kind of students our schools today have to produce. I will therefore refer again to the same RAND report that I had quoted in an earlier post. In this same report it said:

“…the skills of the workforce will increasingly be the defining characteristic that determines the extent to which an economy can develop and exploit new technologies and compete in the global marketplace. A highly skilled workforce will be needed to realize and take advantage of change in IT, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. The shift in organizational forms and the nature of employment relationships also favor strong cognitive and entrepreneurial skills. For example, … knowledge workers require high-level cognitive skills for managing, interpreting, validating, transforming, communicating, and acting on information. Valued skills include such non-routine analytic skills as abstract reasoning, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. Workers with these skills can perform tasks that require higher-skill human action not easily codified into computer software.”

The skills indicated above surely demands that school seriously think (or re-think as the case may be) how the teaching and learning is to take place in the school. The typical high stakes examination curricula that has been adopted by many schools may have worked for an industrial system of the late 19th and 20th century. The 21st century demands a very set of workers and therefore different teaching and learning goals and approaches.

A school that intends to produce the workforce of the 21st century should place a heavy emphasis on understanding. The passing or even the acing of high stakes examinations does not mean that a student has understood what he has learned in school. David Perkins argued that teaching of understanding should be pursued. He said:

“Knowledge and skill in themselves do not guarantee understanding. People can acquire knowledge and routine skills without understanding their basis or when to use them. And, by and large, knowledge and skills that are not understood do students little good! What use can students make of the history or mathematics they have learned unless they have understood it?”

- “Teaching for Understanding” by David Perkins

Perkins has written about the Smart School, his conception of a school that would pursue the need for understanding. The Smart School is guided by seven key principles. These principles are guided or underpinned by two beliefs. The first is that, learning is a consequence of thinking, and good thinking is learnable by all students. Secondly, learning should include deep understanding, which involves the flexible, active use of knowledge. It is because deep understanding “involves the flexible, active use of knowledge” that it becomes vital for school to seriously consider Perkins’ proposal. To be flexible and use knowledge actively is to dive into the unknown as opposed to going back to what is already known. This understanding is so important because it allows for real application and re-assessment of concepts already learned.  It is this flexible and active use of knowledge which is the hallmark of the worker of the 21st century.