Regaining Pedagogical Primacy in 21st Century Schools

The articles in this issue of ‘The European Educational Researcher’ all concern the various facets of education to become vitalized in the coming decade. Its perspective is not so much to overcome flaws and deficits; its perspective is to become ready for the further 21^st century. What is so different from the 20^th century is that at that time Europe, The Middle East and the US still accepted education as a transfer process: from ‘those who know and can’ into the minds of ‘those who are still innocent and unaware of traditions and best practices so far’. The overall educational paradigm of the 21^st century is to regard schooling as the start of a life-long learning process. But more important: Learning in the current knowledge economies and the complex multi-cultural societies is a process of knowledge assembly, creative thinking and entrepreneurial mentality. Teachers in the next decades will have more diverse roles than before; not only conveyers of domain knowledge; also the roles of coach, mentor and process facilitators. Indeed; learning gradually shifts towards feeding social/emotional/cognitive development of learners who are quite unique in personality, family backgrounds and prior knowledge. Taking these differential conditions in mind, education still has the intention to target uniformity learning results so that finally citizens will understand each other and find common interest and intuition. However the process on how to arrive there will differ substantially, as we now see in projects around the world.

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Kommers, P. (2022). Regaining Pedagogical Primacy in 21st Century Schools. The European Educational Researcher, 5(1), 129-131.