The 21st Century! Should we be terrified?

I recently read an article regarding the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. I was pointed toward the website (Partnership for 21st Century Skills) and much of the information from the article is pulled from the website.

Essentially the Partnership proposes a new direction in education that focuses on the potential needs of students in the future. Our students must be taught to think critically and solve complex problems often through collaborative efforts. Certainly core curriculum skills are still the bedrock of this concept of education and in fact 9 separate core areas are listed as opposed to our traditional three R's. (This information is available in the core subjects section of the Partnership website.)
Beyond these 9 core areas, the program stresses the need to include additional core skills or knowledge areas in the curriculum. These include Global Awareness and Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial awareness among civic and health awareness.
The inclusion of these additional areas is indicative of the concept of "world-flattening" wherein technology is making professional and personal resources around the globe available to employers everywhere. In order to compete burgeoning business world our students must essentially be trained to become managers in that they need not only work skills, but they must also possess managerial, collaborative, and economic responsibility capabilities.
Other sections of the website discuss this need for our students to be able to think critically, come up with innovative solutions to difficult problems and most importantly to collaborate with others in producing these solutions. The future workforce must be able to work with others and they must be able to communicate with people from different continents seamlessly. To do that, they must be taught the current technological skills and they must be taught how to continue learning as new technology becomes available.
This leads us to a third component of the Partnership vision, that of teaching information and media literacy, not so much as a means to teach students how to use these emerging tools today, but to enable them to continue learning how to use new tools in the future. The ability to understand and use information and communication technologies will be a tremendous asset to our students in their futures.
Lastly, the program discusses the need to teach our students the professional life skills that will help them later in life. These are really many of the same life skills we've always needed. For example, students need to be flexible and adaptable. They need to be prepared for career changes and project direction switches. They also need to be self-motivated and aggressive workers. With a flattened world with many resources, our students simply can afford to be complacent. Our students need to learn to manage their own tasks as well as the tasks of a group. For this they also need to learn leadership.
Clearly this is all very daunting when it's taken in all at once. The idea is to begin to develop curricula that work these skills into daily lessons in all subjects. Further discussion is lent to the idea of developing assessments that can adequately monitor progress in the targeted improvement areas. While incorporating these principles into our schools may be difficult and time-consuming, ultimately we'll produce students better able to succeed in the future job market.