Commentary: Have ‘Four Cs’ replaced ‘Three Rs’ in education?

“What was considered a good education 50 years ago … is no longer enough for success in college, career and citizenship in the 21st Century.”

That’s the introduction to the National Education Assn.’s report on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and it’s been the message of many a school board meeting and education conference over the last 10 years.

Fast-paced “change happens” videos with pulsing soundtracks have played to audiences locally and across the state to jar them out of their old, 20th century worlds and into the new.

Technology in classrooms is commonplace. With online attendance reporting and homework hotlines, computer-based testing, student-produced digital media and even three-dimensional printing, schools are incorporating technology as our district motto suggests, “To prepare our children for their future.”

Electronic-waste collections organized as school fundraisers are telltale indicators of the short lives of technological innovations and hint at the continuous rounds of training required for their use in classrooms. Beyond the classroom, technology touches lives. We’ve seen how quickly social media can rock families and nations.

Yes, the cultural landscape has altered, and schools must certainly change with it. I applaud the teachers and administrators who are leading the charge to roll out the Common Core Curriculum, with its focus on developing problem-solving skills — and making good use of technology.

There’s a new emphasis, too, on the “Four Cs,” considered critical skills for success: communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.

These are among the skills employers so often lament as lacking in their job applicants. At last, industry and education leaders are coming into synchronicity in efforts to create pathways to college and career, to relink classroom education and real-world skills, book arts and manual arts. Hallelujah!

Yet a part of me worries about the way schools talk about this change, the way the “Four Cs” are often presented as so fundamentally different from the “old way” of teaching, as if no one taught communication skills before now, as if such skills weren’t needed or learned.

“Life today is exponentially more complicated and complex than it was 50 years ago….In the manufacturing and agrarian economies that existed 50 years ago, it was enough to master the ‘Three Rs’ (reading, writing, and arithmetic). In the modern ‘flat world,’ the ‘Three Rs’ simply aren’t enough,” according to the NEA report.

The report goes on to describe this century’s complexities and challenges, like global pandemics and the immigration issue, as if the likes of them had not been seen before.

But the history major in me wonders, did anyone really ever think it enough just to master the “Three Rs”? Didn’t manufacturing require creativity and farming require collaboration to bring crops to market? Did the NEA report writers forget about the flu epidemic of 1918-19 that is estimated to have killed 30 million to 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans (my maternal grandmother among them)? Hasn’t immigration been an issue in our country since its founding?

I quibble about these historical inaccuracies in part because I think we do our students a disservice when we gloss over history. If we want to develop critical-thinking skills, we must model them. But what really troubles me in discussions about 21st century learning are the suggestions that devalue content knowledge.

“Habits of mind can be more important than content knowledge,” the NEA report states.

I heard a similar message at a meeting held recently to update parents on the Common Core curriculum. The teachers and administrators talked about the “Four Cs” and other efforts to promote a “growth mindset” in students.

Dismissing the old ways of teaching facts, one teacher cheerily explained why learning is different now — an explanation I’ve heard more than once before: “Our kids don’t have to have that [information] in their brains. They have Google.”

But what if Google is down? Where will creativity flourish if not in brains with enough prior knowledge inside them to spark ideas when new information comes along?

The old basic facts of math, science and language, as well as the logic of grammar and the stories of people who’ve wrestled with life in earlier centuries are never outdated. Those facts may exist and be accessible “on the cloud,” but students must use their brains to sort them out and apply them to the needs of the planet. We forget history at our peril. Learning matters.

JOYLENE WAGNER writes for Times Community News (TCN) in Los Angeles County.