WE have known the 3Rs as basis for the literacy of the olden times. With shorter and less complex curriculum and instructions, the older educational systems focused on the essentials of reading, writing and arithmetic. Then, when distractions are less, parents are able to inculcate and ensure the knowledge, skills, attitude and values of children, whose world was limited to what the small neighborhood community could offer and what limited media reach could communicate. Science may be young but sufficient to explain the basics of fundamental life and living.
Society, with its relatively limited concerns, was able to prescribe (and enforce) basic norms of behavior. It was easier to submit to these socio-cultural standards, especially when even personal philosophies were limited to basic traditional perspectives through the conventional metrics of right and wrong.
Traditional literacy is defined as “the quality of being literate; knowledge of letters; condition in respect to education, ability to read and write.” It is the building block for all other literacies; without it, they would be impossible to master. Moreover, foundational or traditional literacy is about print on a page, or decoding and making sense of words, images and other content that a reader can string together and then begin to comprehend. They are the words and pictures students read and pore over that are contained in textbooks, in novels, on standardized tests, and even in comic books.
Literacy has evolved to cover the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society. The world that has become more complex has been ironically reduced as a small global village.
The 21st Century Learning
The 21st century requires literacy beyond the academically learned and traditionally measured literacy. It covers three areas of knowledge, namely, foundational, humanistic and meta knowledge.
Foundational Knowledge “to know” includes core content knowledge in the particular discipline, digital and ICT Literacy, and cross-disciplinary knowledge. The future world of work in the 21st century will regard these as the basic requisite to employment and career growth.
Humanitic Knowledge “to value” pertains to life and job skills, ethical and emotional awareness, and cultural competence. These become the differentiators of what is basic and could hold the key to career development.
The Meta Knowledge to act covers creativity and innovation, problem solving and critical thinking and communication and collaboration. These are expected to be the real deal in becoming successful in life and career, success, happiness, joy and prosperity which definition also transformed among individuals in a highly diverse world.
There are more specific competencies that are expected to change the rules of the workplace, life, and living in the future. Multi-cultural Literacy is all about understanding ethnic groups that comprise the population and focuses on complex issues of identity, diversity, and citizenship. There is even Social Literacy, which is the development of social skills, knowledge and positive values in human beings to act positively and responsibly in sophisticated complex social settings. The sociological, anthropological and cultural landscapes are expected to change with the more globalized but harmonized communities within communities.
In the age of fake news, Media Literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in all traditional and social forms, and everything that may still come in the future. Digital Literacy is the ability to effectively use digital devices for purposes of communication, expression, collaboration and advocacy in a knowledge-based society.
Financial Literacy is the ability to make informed judgments and make effective decisions regarding the use and management of money. Ecological Literacy is about the understanding of the principles of ecosystems toward sustainability. The global awareness and an emerging purpose-driven younger generation shows bias for what are more responsible enterprises and brands.
Creative Literacy is the ability to make original ideas that have value, and the ability to see the world in new ways. In a modern society characterized by being volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (referred to as VUCA), change remains to be the only thing constant.
Some references classify 21st Century Skills into three, namely, foundational, competencies and character qualities. Foundational Literacies refer to how persons are able to apply core skills to everyday tasks. It includes literacy, numeracy, scientific literacy, ICT Literacy, Financial Literacy and Cultural and Civic Literacy. Competencies refer to the person’s ability to approach complex challenges, which covers critical thinking and problem solving, creativity, communication and collaboration. Character qualities enumerate the person’s approach to changing environment. Character includes curiosity, initiative, persistence and grit, adaptability, leadership and social-cultural awareness.
The Unesco Pillars of Education
There is hope in education. With it in the frontline to future-proofing humanity, it should be able to transform from the 19th century classrooms that are managed by 20th century teachers. The future-proofing of humanity is anchored on perspectives of how education should transform as a potent agent of change itself.
The Unesco has identified the 4 learnings essential for the 21st century, namely, learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together. It expanded to cover the learning to transform or learning to change.
The pandemic has challenged all lifelong learners to learn new requirement of the 21st century living, and that is, learning to learn.
The outcomes-based education has shifted the focus from the teacher to the learner. It has transformed the role of teachers to be facilitators of learning, a guide by the side, from being the content provider like a sage on the stage. Assessment of quality education shifted from the input to the process, or steps undertaken by the learner in partnership with the teacher in a competencies-oriented learning environment. From the traditional paper and pencil tests, the traditional assessments emerged as performance, (which learners demonstrate and which teacher measures with the intentional to improve), product (which the learner is able to create), and portfolio (which is a collection of artifacts, that the learner is able to collect to prove learning).
Certainly, humanity’s greatest capacity is to collectively cope with forces of change, while at the same time proactively catalyzing the change as a formidable spirit to improve upon what it is given at the moment. There is hope so long as the best parts of humanity are there—its creativity, empathy, and stewardship and the emerging new and collective moral consciousness based on shared sense of destiny.