Skills and the Meaning of Life

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

COMPETITIVE edge in the 21^st century requires that educational institutions have to evolve a framework that would enhance the capacity of students to succeed in their lives and chosen careers during the Information Age. The book 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times written by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, describes the “21^st century skills movement”, or how the global landscape for learning is reshaping itself, and what the global transformation is all about.

Based on a framework developed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the book discusses three clusters of skills: a) Learning and innovation skills, b) Digital literacy skills, and c) Life and career skills.

Learning and innovation skills equips the students “about the mental processes required to adapt and improve upon a modern work environment.” Under this are the four C’s: Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication.

Digital Literacy skills enables the student to discern facts, assess the source of information, and understand the technology behind them. Listed under this cluster are: Information technology, Media literacy and Technology literacy.

Life and career skills focuses on enhancing the capacity of students to effectively direct their life and career choices. The skills under this cluster: Flexibility, Leadership, Initiative, Productivity and Social skills.

Students are self-educating themselves, based on information available on the information highway, without guidance from the academe. Without guidance and a workable framework, students swim in the sea of information, unable to frame the questions and derive answers that is possible only with a clear vision and a viable strategy.

In the book 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, Yuval Noah Harari probes into today’s most urgent issues as advances in technology overtakes our comprehension of it. He discusses the challenges of navigating life for the human species to survive. He explores, with the increasing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence (AI) approximating, or even surpassing, our own intellectual capacities, how we may avoid the possibility of becoming the “useless class” when most of our physical and mental challenges could be better performed by AI.

In the concluding part of the book (Part V, under the subheading “Resilience”), Harari poses a question, “How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?” He suggests the following:

a. Education. develop the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine the bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

b. Meaning. What is the purpose and meaning of life?

c. Meditation. Focus on the breath and observe the reality of the moment.

In the continuing process of “skilling”, it is important to know the reality of oneself, while still possible, before algorithms define what we are and what we should know about ourselves. Surviving the 21^st century is not the ultimate goal, but knowing the purpose and meaning of life, enjoying each breath, and flowing consciously with the rhymes and rhythms of the universe.

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