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Friday, 20 March 2015

Social and emotional skills for the global economy

"The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was founded in 1948 to help the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II."

Here are its dire predictions for 2060:
 


Despite its predictions, the OECD report Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills tells us that:
Today’s children will need a balanced set of cognitive, social and emotional skills in order to succeed in modern life...There are reliable measures of social and emotional skills that can be used across age groups at least within a cultural and linguistic boundary.
http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-for-social-progress-9789264226159-en.htm

The psychological testing of children is on its agenda.  Should this organisation have such influence?

From an open letter to Dr Schleicher,
We assume that OECD's Pisa experts are motivated by a sincere desire to improve education. But we fail to understand how your organisation has become the global arbiter of the means and ends of education around the world. OECD's narrow focus on standardised testing risks turning learning into drudgery and killing the joy of learning. As Pisa has led many governments into an international competition for higher test scores, OECD has assumed the power to shape education policy around the world, with no debate about the necessity or limitations of OECD's goals. We are deeply concerned that measuring a great diversity of educational traditions and cultures using a single, narrow, biased yardstick could, in the end, do irreparable harm to our schools and our students.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-tests-damaging-education-academics

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