At the heart of the matter

I get slightly tired of the rhetoric around ‘education for the twenty-first century’, as if the mere passing of a certain multiple of a thousand years from an arbitrarily defined point ushers in a new era of enlightenment. Yes, there are deep-rooted social, economic, technological, environmental and cultural changes. And of course education is inseparable from these. Yes, governments regularly remind us of the importance of education for economic and social development in a changing global environment; the term education revolution has now become commonplace. Yet how serious are we (and by that I mean our nation) about embracing real educational change for the needs of the future?