The 10 Fundamentals Of Education You Need In The 21st Century

There’s a growing global movement to redefine and reprioritize the goals of education in the 21st century. The technological age has transformed how learning is practiced each day, while expanding the range of measures in student achievement.

Today, one either has the ability to meet the new demands of the time or simply ends up trapped in the past. Here are the top 10 fundamentals of education in the 21st Century:

1.) Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is a dynamic process of vision, change, and creation. It requires an application of energy and passion towards the creation and implementation of new ideas and creative solutions. Essential ingredients include the willingness to take calculated risks in terms of time, equity, or career; the ability to formulate an effective venture team; the creative skill to marshal needed resources; and fundamental skill of building solid business plan; and finally, the vision to recognize opportunity where others see chaos, contradiction, and confusion.

Entrepreneurship is more than the mere creation of business. Although that is certainly an important facet, it’s not the complete picture. The characteristics of seeking opportunities, taking risks beyond security, and having the tenacity to push an idea through to reality combine into a special perspective that permeates entrepreneurs.

2.) Cooperation

Cooperative learning is a method of teaching considered vital to today’s educational environment. Students can be put into smalls groups to complete certain tasks. Cooperation is beneficial because knowledge is exchanged and converged through social interaction.

When the grade of an entire project depends on the group as a whole, students are encouraged to share opinions and knowledge. This offers a less competitive learning environment. Weaker students or those that are less apt to share ideas openly or take part in classroom discussions are encouraged to participate. This helps build self-confidence in those students.

Students have shown overall positive effects of cooperative learning with computer based technology on student achievement, attitudes towards learning, and self concept as compared to traditional instruction.

3.) Writing

Today, in the 21st Century, people write as never before- in print and online. Writing isn’t typically the first skill that comes to mind when one imagines a high-tech learning initiative. Writing itself is a high-order area of a curriculum in terms of thinking.

By teaching oneself to embrace the future and support all forms of 21st Century conspired works, inside school and outside, we musty strive to grow up in a society that values knowledge and hard work over owning stuff and looking cool. Teachers are taught that if their students do better in writing, more times than not they do better across the board in other subject areas.

4.) HTML

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, is the standardized markup language for displaying web pages and other web browser material. These HTML elements form the essential building blocks of all websites. The main purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and arrange them into functioning web pages with visible or audible specifications. HTML provides one central language that can read a web page and, if done correctly, eliminates any fear of showing the code.

Without knowing HTML, it is almost impossible to actually put up a website successfully. It serves as the backbone to web design language and is considered basic, fundamental knowledge. Before jumping to the more advanced material, one must first master the basics if trying to be technologically successful in today’s world.

5.) Photoshop

Photoshop is a computer software program, developed and published by Adobe, that allows one to alter a photographic image. The leading digital media application for the Internet, Photoshop is embraced by a number of graphic artists, print designers, and even ordinary computer users. Almost every picture you’ve seen, either on book covers, posters, or magazine pictures, has at some point either been created or edited by Photoshop.

The powerful tools that Photoshop comes equipped with to enhance and edit these pictures are also capable of taking the limits of the digital world and surpassing them with the help of the infinitely possible Internet.

6.) Financial Independence

One of the biggest steps toward leading an independent life is financial independence. This type of self-sufficiency starts by taking control of your money that you earn and accepting that it is yours to spend. Money is necessary to live and live in our society, but you don’t need to be independent, successful, and happy. Managing your money will help you have it and make it work for you.

Money management is the process of managing money, including budgeting, investing, banking and taxes. Money management is a strategic plan to try to yield the highest interest from your money. The problem lies in that our financial world has become so increasingly complex that it is difficult for any person not working in the financial industry to keep up with it all.

7.) Failure As A Necessity

Failure. The word conjures up all sorts of negative images in people's minds. It's something people don't like to think about. But maybe that's because people don't really understand it. Ask yourself the following question: who never fails? The answer, of course, is nobody. We all fail at a lot of things all the time; Abraham Lincoln failed in many military, business, and political roles before he became one of the nation's most successful presidents.

The right way to think about failure is that every time you fail you are simply taking one additional step on your ultimate path to success. If you think about it, there has never been a success, which was not preceded by failures - usually many of them.

The only really negative aspect about failing is what we often let it do to us internally. We sometimes become so afraid of the stigma of failure that we no longer try new things. When we allow ourselves to adopt that mindset, we miss out on the opportunity to succeed.

8.) Defining Your Own American Dream

The American Dream has always involved a clear sense of the goals to be pursued and means by which they might be achieved. The American Dream has clear expectations both for the individual and the nation. At the individual level, the Dream demands “character,” academic preparation, honesty, hard work, frugality, and persistence.

At the national level, the Dream demands that society provide an open, fair, competitive, entrepreneurial environment in which individual merit could find its place.

It’s not about a big house or a lot of stuff. It’s about finding ways to improve your living standards through hard work and ingenuity. Materialism is out. Self-sufficiency is in. Make the mental adjustment, and the American Dream will once again be within reach. A dream that you created.

9.) Creativity

Creativity is the ability to think in unconventional ways, to take initiative, and to take appropriate risks. It makes your mind active instead of passive. Curious people have active minds and the mind is a muscle; the more you work it the stronger it becomes. It opens up new worlds and possibilities.

By being curious you see things that you wouldn’t typically see. Curiosity and imagination leave no time for students to embrace boredom. They are central elements of critical thinking. We need to be curious. Developing our capacity for imagination, creativity and empathy will be increasingly important to our competitive advantage in the future.

10.) Social Media Knowledge

In the last decade, the Internet has changed how teachers and students learn in the classroom. Companies like Google, Wikipedia, and WordPress have opened the door to instant exploration of subjects and questions that haven’t been available in the classroom before. Students are now able to explore the ancient Egyptian pyramids using Google Maps, see updated facts and information on a wiki, or read a famous explorer’s blog posts on their expeditions, all safely from their desks.

Classrooms, schools and even districts are able to share and collaborate in private social networks, expanding collective knowledge and relationships to new horizons. The Internet has allowed education to expand past local resources, and draw from a vast library of knowledge that organizations and businesses are actively contributing to everyday.

With our culture’s shift to “social,” companies have created tools that offer free platforms for blogs, wikis and private social networking sites. These simple tools are allowing all of academia to contribute to the ever-expanding online library of knowledge. Now, parts of education are moving out of the classroom and onto the Internet, where knowledge sharing and collaboration is happening beyond the walls of the classroom.

Steven J Sypa | Elite.