Forty-five years later, I still remember my home phone number that I had when I was a kindergartener in the south suburbs of Chicago. As a child in the 1980s, knowing your home telephone number and address was a basic skill. Like many other skills once considered foundational, memorizing telephone numbers is now uncommon and largely unnecessary.
So what are “basic skills” in 2025? I frequently hear (and sometimes join) debates playing out on social media over whether children should learn cursive handwriting, typing, or multiplication tables. I could share why I think cursive handwriting is a must, typing is unnecessary, and multiplication tables are helpful but not required. While we all have our own views on these topics, many educators have not had a substantive discussion about how basic skills have changed over time and how those changes impact our curriculum, instruction, use of time, and allocation of resources.
Basic Skills and the Digital Divide
Though technological advances have made some formerly basic skills obsolete, they have not eliminated the gap in technology access known as the “digital divide,” or the vast disparities that exist within schools.
Without a shared definition of basic skills across all schools, educators provide vastly different learning experiences to their students. In some schools, teachers expose children to the latest digital skills, such as writing prompts for AI tools. Their students might be coding, creating apps, and crafting things in makerspaces. In other schools, teachers concentrate on the fundamentals of reading, writing, and mathematics. Their students are completing worksheets and playing computer games. Too often, these differences are tied to students’ socioeconomic status, identity, or zip code.
Children in every community must learn to access, use, and interact with AI and emerging technologies to thrive in the future. More importantly, they must learn to interact with others, gather and evaluate information, think critically, make decisions, communicate, and lead in a society transformed by technology. The new basic skills must support these outcomes for all learners.
Basic skills in 2025 and beyond must be:
- Clearly defined and calibrated for all learners, regardless of their zip code, ethnicity, home language, race, or social class.
- Observed, evaluated, and supported in all schools.
- Taught and practiced in all grades from early childhood through graduation.
Let’s work together to identify the basic skills we can agree on across schools and systems. Then we can examine and advocate for the resources necessary to incorporate these new basic skills into curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy.
Children in every community must learn to access, use, and interact with AI and emerging technologies to thrive in the future.
Identifying the New Basic Skills
Based on my work and experience in schools, I believe educators should start identifying new basic skills within three categories: (1) knowledge building and acquisition, (2) thinking processes, and (3) cognitive/learning skills, which will provide all students with the foundation to grow and excel.
Knowledge Building and Acquisition
Learning standards typically focus on specific reading and math skills. As a result, the important task of building and acquiring knowledge is often neglected in standards-based instruction. This is especially problematic for underrepresented students, who frequently enter school with less background knowledge and vocabulary than other children. Knowledge building and acquisition provide a foundation upon which to build other skills. They also give children access to conversations, environments, and instruction that broadens and deepens their understanding.
There are three basic skills within the category knowledge building and acquisition that I believe schools need to teach: building schema with which to connect new knowledge, collecting experiences with and information about different environments and topics, and developing a broad repertoire of vocabulary words and language structures. When we add these basic skills to our list, we will reprioritize field trips and other experiences, real-world research and discussion, and curricular areas such as science and social studies.
Thinking Processes
Thinking processes are incorporated into most grade-level standards. Unfortunately, in practice, educators often reserve activities requiring high-level thinking for high-achieving students. Many curricula place these activities at the end of units, where they are frequently cut due to time constraints.
But all students should be taught to gather and analyze information, comprehend texts, solve problems, and enhance and communicate their thinking. They need to learn how to access and synthesize information from disparate sources; analyze arguments; generate ideas and options; reflect on, connect with, and integrate new knowledge and experiences; and define problems and design solutions with and without technology tools. These basic skills require a high level of learner engagement and additional time to sustain critical thinking.
Cognitive/Learning Skills
Teachers generally expect students to demonstrate cognitive/learning skills daily. Unfortunately, we sometimes skip focused instruction on these skills because we assume students will develop them naturally. Basic cognitive/learning skills include asking questions; seeking evidence; attending to details and the big picture; formulating and communicating complete thoughts; speaking, writing, and composing for an audience; and making comparisons. They should also include often neglected adaptive and social-emotional skills such as adapting one’s performance to expectations or needs, feeling and showing empathy, listening for understanding, learning and effectively using new technologies, and functioning in the absence of technology tools.
Skills We Should Leave Behind
There are two skills we should agree to permanently remove from our basic skills list.
- Rote memorization that doesn’t support other skills or processes. Naming all 50 states was a key 5th grade expectation in Illinois for many years, but there was little academic or cognitive benefit to this requirement. Disconnected rote memorization tasks simply take time away from more substantive learning.
- Skills for “one time only” tasks. Practical realities in schools often force teachers to teach skills that will only be used once. For example, Illinois teachers once taught students to use the shape of the “bubbles” on multiple-choice questions to determine how many answers to select on state test questions. Circles indicated one correct answer while squares meant two or more answers should be selected. These kinds of skills are practical but otherwise useless.
Collectively defining “basic skills” for the age of AI will cause educators, leaders, and policymakers to rethink how we plan instruction, allocate time, and determine the resources needed in schools. It will also help us prepare all learners for a future in which learning phone numbers might be obsolete, but new basic skills are here to stay.
