Abstract
To meet the demands of a society and workplace in flux, an educated person in the twenty-first century, over the course of his schooling, will need to develop a set of capabilities and competencies that have not previously been demanded of educated people— such as adaptability, confidence in the face of profound economic and psychic uncertainty, and the proclivity to keep mastering new subject matters and technologies over the course of a lifetime. Various members in the Gordon Commission have attempted to advance concepts that account for both the kind of character and “toolkit” that would signify a person as educated in the twenty-first century. In this chapter, we will discuss both Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia’s (2012) concept of “knowledgeability” as well as my own idea of “intellective competence.” As I contemplate the common thread between these two concepts—and really, the essence of what we are getting at when we attempt to define “educated”—I keep returning to the idea of human agency. Perhaps what we are saying is that a person with agency is able to become intellectively competent. So, what exactly do we mean by agency?
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© 2016 Edmund W. Gordon and Kavitha Rajagopalan
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Gordon, E.W., Rajagopalan, K. (2016). Both Educating and Being Educated are Changing in the Twenty-First Century. In: The Testing and Learning Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137519962_4
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