9 twenty-first century skills I teach my students

In the twenty-two years of my teaching and mentoring journey, I have worked with individuals of all ages, backgrounds and learning needs, across multiple areas: Philosophy, Religious Studies, English, German, Music Production, Academic Skills, Special Educational Needs, and more.?

Whatever the subject, when I ask my students for feedback, they mention the same elements which made their learning with me enjoyable and effective: matching the teaching style to their way of learning, seeking to explore ideas beyond the curriculum and helping them discover how exciting and engaging learning can be. Surely, to educate others means to take pleasure in seeing them thrive and evolve into fuller human beings over and beyond merely mastering a subject in a technical academic sense. This has been the backbone of my approach throughout the years.

As educators in this time of cultural, political and existential turmoil, what codes and ways of being can we offer our students that could best equip them for the new world? Surely, the new paradigm should abandon the nineteenth century industrial model of teaching subjects locked in rigid categories. We must look deeper, into the kind of learning which can timelessly equip young people for dealing with the ever-changing landscape of the world to come.

Being able to think and speak clearly, critically and daringly, to analyse information and its sources with their inherent biases as well as our own, realising the importance of wisdom, ethical consciousness, having the courage to speak the truth, the discernment to identify deception and the fearless will to expose it. Finally, having a sense of direction, the will to strive for what is best for us as individuals, communities, and for the world at large, requires us to engage with learning content not only on an objective but also on a personal level. This leads us to the first and most fundamental twenty-first century skill I embed in my teaching.

1. How to discover their core values

In the world of manipulated perceptions, fabricated realities and empty words, little can be of more support to young people than knowing their hierarchy of absolutes, according to which they can orient themselves towards goals that are meaningful to them.?

What is most meaningful to us determines the course of our life, whether we are aware of our values or not. The key is to discover what these values are, as we all have them. If we fail to become aware of what our values are or if we deceive ourselves that we have none, someone else will come and make their own values ours.?

By making the unconscious conscious, moving from chaos into structure, is the way to realise one’s true self and purpose in life. Only when we discover what is existentially important to us, can we gain the confidence and courage to sacrifice what is less important. Thus, we forge our destiny making conscious choices with clarity of intent in accordance with our core values, as sovereign agents in the world.

In the world of collapsing paradigms where value systems implode in the midst of ideological idiocy, the indoctrination of propaganda and bullshit, being able to know what we hold sacred is an advantage we need to pierce through the nihilistic illusions of mass conformity. To know our core values means to take ownership of our own life and responsibly move towards the commitment of self-realisation.

2. Self-confidence

So many times my students come to me burdened with societal and medical-diagnostic labels, which engender in them self-limiting beliefs. These beliefs in turn hold them back from progressing forwards.?

Trapped in the mindset of being less-than as a result of underperforming against the rigid grids of assessment criteria, these young people most often are brilliant creative individuals, whose spontaneity, however, stands in the way of the education system’s core objective of conformist performativity. The standardisation of the modern curriculum stifles their unique capacities which, to their peril, they learn to consider hindrances rather than their superpowers. My mission is to let my students rediscover the latter and make advantage of them, even within the context of exam-driven rat race.

My striving to support others to discover their true gifts is a real blessing. I want to empower my clients to appreciate their strengths and teach them how to use these to their advantage once they have learned how to play the academic game of getting top grades. While exam practice is important to master, delivering quantifiable results is necessary but insufficient in the 21st century’s educational project.?

What contributes to my students’ extraordinary achievements is that on top of ticking the right boxes, they learn to make their original ideas shine through the already well-executed work. These ideas shine because the student, while understanding what is expected of them, also internalises the learning so that they can feel passionate about what they write — their work is not merely a disembodied regurgitation of the textbook theory unrelated to the life experience. Instead, it is meaningfully integrated into the student’s own world of thoughts.

Fostering self-esteem is the foundation of any learning. Once we believe in our abilities, our capacity to improve, and build resilience to critical feedback having embraced the growth-mindset, it gives us the power we need to succeed. My students understand that while having to play the game of compliance, they also must exercise their individuality and unique capacities, thus transcending the rigid confines of the syllabus to stand out from others. The can-do attitude and self-belief enables us to set new goals and overcome the fear of failure, and enables us to dream big, over and beyond what we used to dream.

3. Passionate curiosity

Our dreams lead us towards what we love the most. If we are to be successful at what we do, we must be more than just another expert in the world. Rather, we must passionately believe in what we do. This sets us apart from the competition and enriches our academic and professional lives with intrinsic conviction necessary for the passionate pursuit of our chosen discipline. Discovering one’s passionate commitment is critical to living a complete life directed by a sense of meaning and purpose.

While receiving education seems predominantly considered a means to getting a job, the ethic I foster as a professional is one of education being an end in itself. Because I love learning more than teaching, the latter being merely the consequence of the former, I’m on a mission to share with my students how exciting learning really is! I seek to help my students discover something in their learning which ignites their interest in the world. We unlock the best in ourselves when we believe in what we do. It is this unconditional committment to self-development which produces great geniuses and inventors whose curiosity has led them to the precipice of human achievement. It is too easy, tempting and futile today to merely invest in what proves profitable.

Research shows that people driven by merely extrinsic motivation end up most depressed, and it’s no wonder: if what they commit most energy and time has no personal meaning to them! This suggests that many of those who are likely considered most successful through the lens of our morally bankrupt societal categories feel wretched despite the limelight they enjoy publicly. To avoid this we must be able to afford a degree of idealism to be able to call ourselves full human beings amongst a decaying society.

We must help our students discover how their learning can make them feel more alive by helping them find that which has the power of sustaining their curiosity in the years to come. Once they discover what they care about, the next step is to strive towards applying their knowledge and skills to a career which can make both their life and the world better.

4. The culture of dialogue

Our personal and professional growth, however, would not be possible unless we can share our experience of the world and communicate with others to learn from one another. Reason is dialogical: we cannot evolve without taking into account perspectives contrary to our own. We therefore cannot say that we know unless we develop a distance to our own distortions of judgement, biases and unconscious cues leading our assessment of reality astray.

As right now we are living through the collapse of the Western world, the cognitive complexity of the problems we are facing is greater than our individual cognitive capacity. Therefore, in order to survive we need collective sensemaking. This is why it is more important than ever for us to be able to facilitate a reasoned conversation with others, especially those holding ideas different from our own.?

Having said this, I am aware that amidst the polarised landscape of culture wars and mass ideological infection, open and transparent conversation is more difficult than ever. As the cross-fire of narrative warfare, censorship and mass-deception of both the political and marketing machines capture our consciousness, and manipulate collective perceptions of ground reality, the cultural malaise of the decaying Western society unfolds. Nevertheless, our task remains to equip each other with conceptual, ethical and practical tools to deal with this mess, which is going to get much worse before it gets better.

It takes courage and genuine committment to the truth to be able to speak up in these days. This is what I demonstrate and try to encourage my students to do also. It is in the sacred interest of humanity to be able to hold conversations which make one uncomfortable and insecure. The key is not to turn a blind eye on the issues which make one feel this way. Rather, we ought to look into ourselves and find out what it is that triggers defensive limbic responses in us. We must heal our trauma and learn to feel vulnerable with ourselves. This requires the acceptance of the discomfort as an intermediary stage to building new bridges between individuals and cultures. If we can’t hold a conversation without demonising the opponent or merely because a company policy, a made up regulation or "community guidelines," say so — all of which often coerce us into denying ourselves adult conversation — we are lost to the silent tyranny of self-censorship.?

We must be able to communicate freely and openly about the most sensitive issues while exercising doing so in a way that is not inflammatory but calibrated for seeking mutual understanding and the will to learn from one another. We are thinking beings through our exercise of our capacity for articulated speech. While historical laws, cultures, and regimes come and go, this evolutionary marker of dialogical reason remains absolute.?

It seems to me that the educators of tomorrow must be able to put their careers, safety or even life at stake for the sake of facilitating a culture of sincere dialogue liberated from the shackles of temporary socio-historical circumstances. To be able to do this, we will need a lot of strength and courage: physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. If we don’t, we let our kids and their futures down.

5. Critical thinking and research skills

The culture of dialogue leads us to the more specific point about applying the faculty of critical reason to any piece of information we acquire. It can be argued that our information ecology is broken and the only reliable tool we can cultivate to dig into the layer of signal drowned out by the noise is to fearlessly examine not only what is true from what is fictional, but what the potential motivations behind any piece of available information are.?

The rigorous application of logic and critical analysis of evidence is just as important as identifying the reliability of sources, not by merely checking their affiliations with the major sense-making institutions, most of which are currently in a process of decay, but to judge the value of the information by the author’s degree of integrity, i.e., evaluating what they say in light of what they do.?

In the world where much of science itself is a slave to the zombie corpse of consumer capitalism, the critical thinker of tomorrow must not only be able to critically analyse conflicting narratives where noise drowns out the signal, but also to evaluate whole sensemaking paradigms and their institutions, many of whose corruptions have been exposed through the cracks opened up by the Covid-19 crisis. The new era of sensemaking depends on those who are willing to think, speak and will according to one’s core values, who prioritise speaking what feels true, and doing what feels right, as opposed to the convenient cowardice of false consciousness.

6. Analysing discourse

None of the latter would be possible unless we educate our students in how to recognise the forces, strategies and techniques which shape public discourse. Living in an environment oversaturated with information we feel dazzled and bewildered when facing the enormous task of having to distinguish between the noise of narrative warfare and the?signal of intelligibility.?

Feeling stuck in the midst of continuous culture wars, it is critically important not only to understand the propositional meaning of language, but the intentions, motives, values, biases, and latent purposes inherent in it as a part of self-serving agendas of the existing loci of power.?

These power relations as established and reinforced through language, then amplified by the propaganda machines, must fall under the scrutiny of critical reasoning so that we can recognise the protocols commonly deployed in shaping mass consciousness. Our students must be aware of all this so that they are armed with a number of critical lenses through which they can analyse the information they are exposed to.

In classroom, we analyse the way narratives are presented across a range of platforms, both mainstream and social media. We analyse the benefits and dangers of both, and investigate how much of the narrative remains consistent across the spectrum, how much of it is inconsistent, and what implications this bears. In class debates, my students collectively establish what the intention behind the message is, distinguish between truth and truthfulness, and consequently, how the author’s potential biases and vested interests may affect the purpose of the text regardless of its veracity.?

We thus analyse, critique and evaluate the inner protocols which govern the phenomena floating on the surface of the public discourse over which the arguments of the media spectacle are being had. Exposing the depths of motivations behind what is visible or commonly taken at face value is a part of my mission to educate my students in being able to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

7. Interdisciplinary approach: philosophy, psychology and language

With much of the chaos in which our culture is drowning today being caused by mass manipulation by behavioural and psychoanalytic protocols, whoever has no understanding of psychology becomes a helpless victim of the powerful forces that shape the ongoing societal malaise. To say more, thinking occurs through language and the relationship between the two must be investigated in detail so that we understand how decoupling concepts from words can be weaponised to undermine our critical assessment of reality. Once this educational goal is achieved, further philosophical and socio-historical framing of a given issue offers a greater context within which students can view the current cultural developments in relation to other similar events in history.

We might talk about language in context of advertising or social media, for example. This is a perfect opportunity to diverge into the psychological, evolutionary, cultural, anthropological and philosophical underpinnings of these new phenomena. Multi-contextual thinking not only helps my students comprehend concepts more fully, but also enables them to recognise exploitative and harmful ways in which corporate scientism deploys its strategies to hack our consciousness by misdirecting attention, conditioning our behaviour, undermining our agency or otherwise deceiving our palaeolithic cognition with its superhuman technologies.

In an open and transparent classroom dialogue we share our honest insights and learn from each other, which is necessary for a fluid multidisciplinary comprehension of the currents which shape our shared world. This is crucial because in our techno-scientific paradigm different branches of knowledge have expanded so far, that some people argue that we are trapped in the age of specialisation. Being a specialist is great in many ways but it focuses our attention on a narrow scope of expertise, thus preventing us from seeing the big picture. One of the features I foster which my students appreciate is drawing synoptic links across disciplines throughout the teaching and learning process to mitigate this.

8. Creative meaning-making

Discussions on science and technology often lead us to discovering that no matter how much knowledge science can offer us, it cannot offer us existential meaning. Even though we can have all the toys in the world and are free to fulfil any desire on the market, it seems increasingly difficult to pursue goals that we find both personally rewarding. While our technoscientific culture offers explanations of almost any how, it seems to me that what keeps us stuck in the ever exacerbating mental health crisis is our inability to discover our whys.

Whenever we learn a topic, I encourage my students to link it not only to what they think about it, but how they feel about its relation to their experience of life, and the world. In other words, we learn what a piece of knowledge means objectively only as a stage to discovering how it is existentially meaningful to us, i.e., how it can support our wisdom. The rational understanding only helps us insofar as it serves technical ends. But unless we are able to ground the literal thinking of propositional knowledge in a divergent perspective which fosters lateral understanding, the student will not be able to generate committment and intrinsic motivation to fuel their academic attainment with authenticity.

With the exam-driven culture of school curricula, learners find little time or will during school days to explore what their learning means to them as individuals. Here’s where we, private tutors come in to ignite their interest through developing a dialogical interpersonal perspective on whatever the subject, offering a bespoke personalised service aimed at holistic growth: both academic and personal.

9. Sovereignty

While the main reason for hiring a tutor is to crush an exam and enable students to achieve life goals, a necessary prerequisite of this is generating an inner drive to become an independent learner and thinker.?

One of the myths about tutoring is that students grow dependent on the support they receive. This is a common misconception. The ultimate purpose behind any teaching is empowering the student to take ownership of their work through facilitating their spontaneous engagement with the subject. In addition, forming a bond where the student learns to develop a sense of accountability, self-discipline and pride in having agency to make their life what they want it to be, is essential.

It seems clear to me, that to educate means more than merely helping others master a particular area of knowledge or praxis. As educator and personal mentor, one ought to draw the student’s attention to the value of education itself and why they should recognise the liberating power of being able to think and decide for themselves, and exercise their agency in the world. Those who fail to realise this are bound to defer their sensemaking to authorities of institutions which are collapsing in front of our eyes. The sovereign individual of the future is one who is able to discern the criteria according to which knowledge is worth the effort of seeking.?

A person who understands how powerful we become through our unceasing self-interested committment to improving ourselves and others is capable of discerning the difference between illusion, bias, misperception and myriad other species of self-deception which undermine our sense of agency and sovereignty.

Epilogue: transcending the future

No doubt, this is not an easy time for educators around the world. To paraphrase Sir Ken Robinson, "We have to come up with a plan for the next years while not knowing what the world will be like in two months." This is why I feel that going back to the fundamental principles which underpin any possible kind of successful education is essential for us to explore, whatever these fundamental principles are for you.?

I have only shared what has worked for me as a modest incentive for the colleague educators reading this to think and share their ideas too. I welcome any comments on the above and am keen to discuss any ideas I haven’t thought about which could enrich my own practice.?

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