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It is easy to produce a list of “soft skills” needed for work in the Knowledge Age. More than 140,000 Web pages contain the phrase, and a sampling among the first 4,000 indicates most of them advertise training—communication skills training, thinking skills training, human-relations skills training, and so on. Without presuming to evaluate these multitudinous efforts, we think a fair generalization is that they are relatively short-term interventions that do not so much develop new skills as sharpen or repurpose old ones. The ability to write a coherent paragraph, to utter a cogent statement, to make sense of numerical data, to mathematize and solve a quantitative problem, to read people’s intentions and moderate personal goals in the interests of team success—these and many other soft or semi-soft skills take years to develop. People look to the schools to do the long-term work. The soft skills are all very difficult to teach and their transferability to new situations must always be questioned. Curriculum standards and guidelines, in echoing the business world’s list of soft skills, tend to treat them as if effective means of teaching them were readily at hand. Even learning scientists often lend support to this unwarranted and facile optimism, claiming their approaches teach a range of 21st-century skills, similar to those in the curriculum guidelines and in the 140,000 Web pages.

We take it that the actual belief among most learning scientists is that only in the basic academic skill areas of reading, writing, and elementary mathematics do we know how to teach cognitive skills with fair confidence that they will transfer to a wide range of situations. Yet we must …