Professor David Perkins

David Perkins is a senior professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a founding member of Project Zero, co-director for many years, and now senior co-director and member of the steering committee. Project Zero, founded in 1967, is a research and development group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education investigating human intelligence, creativity, understanding, and learning at all levels. David Perkins conducts research on creativity in the arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem solving, understanding, individual and organizational learning, and the teaching of thinking skills. He has participated in curriculum projects addressing thinking, understanding, and learning in Colombia, Israel, Venezuela, South Africa, Sweden, and Australia as well as in the United States. He is actively involved in schoolchange. Perkins is a cofounder of the WIDE World Initiative, a distance learning initiative for practitioners. He is the author of numerous publications, including Smart Schools (The Free Press, 1992), Outsmarting IQ (The Free Press, 1995) on intelligence and its cultivation, The Eureka Effect (Norton, 2001) about creative thinking and King Arthur's Round Table (Wiley, 2003) about organizational intelligence and learning and Making Learning Whole (Jossey-Bass, 2008) about organizing learning around full meaningful endeavors.

"Educating for the Unknown"

As educators, we all want learning that matters, learning that makes a deep difference in students' lives. And of course much of what students study from kindergarten to graduate school does matter. However, a lot of it doesn't. It's too peripheral, too piecemeal, or simply too forgotten. The complex and rapidly changing world we live in amplifies the dilemma with its shifts toward information and service economies, globalization, lengthening of the human life span, and more. Whereas traditionally we educate for the known, today's world also asks us to educate for the unknown, preparing learners with the knowledge and perspectives, the communication, learning, and thinking skills and attitudes for thriving in the 21st century. Here we envision the opportunities and challenges of educating not just for the known butthe unknown.