Literate, Numerate, and Discriminate – Realigning 21st Century Skills

Discrimination can be said to take place during early childhood when the difference between safety and danger are detected even though notions of real and imaginary may still be blurred. Importantly, the versatility of this construct reaches further into lifelong learning and is used in this paper as a means of distilling a range of competencies that are invoked by terms such as information literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, e-literacy, ethical responsibility, global citizenship, and the ‘getting of wisdom’. Following a meta-analysis of the various ways in which 21st century skills are elucidated we propose a conceptual re-alignment of the foundation skills of education to include being discriminate (discerning) alongside being literate and numerate. Motivation for doing so arises from two sources: (1) a perceived privileging of literacy and numeracy – particularly in the context of high-stakes testing; and, (2) the converse of this situation in which literacy and numeracy appear to have a diminished presence within the ‘21st century skills’ agenda. A gap between these agendas becomes more prominent when considering that our interactions with the world are increasingly configured by increasing production and consumption of data from an increasing diversity of sources.