ABSTRACT
In an editorial appearing in the New York Times on May 2, 2008, the conservative columnist David Brooks opined that the central force driving economic change today is not globalization, but rather “the skills revolution.” We in the United States are living at the beginning of what he termed “the cognitive age,” an age that will require people to “become better at absorbing, processing and combining information” (A24), and to develop the ability to understand information and to “exploit it” (A24). Brooks claimed that in the cognitive age the emphasis is on “psychology, culture, and pedagogy-the specific processes that foster learning.” Aside from the fact that Brooks’s column reprises the call by politicians, policy makers, business leaders, and educators to provide the nation’s youth with twenty-first-century skills for the global marketplace, what is interesting about this short piece is its translation of politics, economics, and
education into cognitive skills and learning. With a brief nod to culture, which can easily be collapsed into managing diversity, Brooks brings into view the relationship between psychology, particularly cognitive psychology, and learning and teaching. It appears that the learning sciences, with their focus on learning and their home in psychology, have truly arrived, at least in the ruminations of a conservative, corporate-identified columnist, but then, perhaps, it is not so surprising.
