Soft Skills and Hard Values : Meeting Education's 21st Century Challenges

To help researchers, educators and policy makers understand and support the development of 21st-century skills in schools, this edited volume explores the various iterations of "soft" skills with a particular focus on their implications for values and evaluates ways in which "soft skills" and "hard" values can be integrated.

Discourse throughout the 21st century has focused on the changing nature of work, the need for new skill sets and the disruptive effects of new technologies. This has been a neo-liberal discourse that subordinated personal and individual needs to the needs of a productive workforce delivering more and more efficiencies linked to higher and higher profits. The solution is often seen to be in the development of a school curriculum that focuses on work-ready skills for an increasingly complex work environment and its demands. Agencies such as OECD and UNESCO highlight the need to link the skills agenda with complementary values. Yet this process is at a very early stage. The proponents of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) for example highlight the impact of new technologies, not just on work but also on the social world. Yet they neglect to explore the values that would be needed in these new disruptive environments.

This book takes up that issue and lays out the multiple value systems that are available for this new 21st century world. It is an important resource for policy makers, academics and teachers with responsibility for a new generation.

Kerry J. Kennedy is Professor Emeritus and Advisor (Academic Development) at The Education University of Hong Kong. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Education and Curriculum Studies at the University of Johannesburg.

Margarita Pavlova is Associate Professor in the Department of International Education, The Education University of Hong Kong and Director of the UNEVOC Centre (Hong Kong), a member of the global UNESCO-UNEVOC network.

John Chi-Kin Lee is Vice President (Academic) and Provost, UNESCO Chair in Regional Education Development and Lifelong Learning, Chair Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Director of the Centre for Religious and Spirituality Education at The Education University of Hong Kong.