21st century skills , fad or foundation

I had a professor once that said that educational views swing like a pendulum.  If you dont like how a system is running now then wait ten years and it will change to the opposite end of the spectrum.  Perhaps this is a slight stretching of the truth but there is a truth running through it.   One decade its drill students on math times tables, but that doesn't exact the desired results so we blame the system and change it to find patterns and games to memorize and not use rote memorization, but that leads to students that can't remember basic multiplication and need to get fingers and toes out to do it, which when i am trying to teach physics 30 is a bottleneck to the flow.  Next decade we will have a "new math" to try to encompass all students to master this basic skill of math.
Now this example picked on math but you can probably cite example from your own fields of this oscillating motion of pedagogy to try to find the magic line that gets all.  In general i believe this is like finding the end of the rainbow, the closer it seems you are to it, the further it gets (darn that refraction of light through water)

BUT...is 21st century skills different?

I think that it is because first of all these are skills that are not JUST classroom centered, this is the stuff of their lives, they do this for fun.  That to me says that it will not just fade to fad status.  The skills will change as technology changes but if we can piggyback the learning on these deep embedded skills we can slip it in and not meet the resistance that  traditional methods of teaching meet every day in classrooms across our countries.