The SDG Target 4.7 emphasises the essence of individuals' possession of 21st-century skills (21cs) and their implication to policy planning, teacher education training and assessment, and curriculum content. This paper examines what a responsive curriculum is and whether the South African (SA) teacher education curriculum is responsive to the demands of the 21cs. We utilised desktop research via a narrative review methodology to extract answers to these questions by searching Google, Scopus, ERIC, and EBSCO databases. The review indicates what a responsive curriculum entails and that the SA teacher education curriculum has yet to respond to 21cs needs fully. The paper concludes that a responsive curriculum is sensitive to current contextual realities and that the SA teacher education curriculum be designed and implemented to develop 21cs among pre-service and graduate teachers. The paper recommends that the teacher education curriculum be dynamic by meeting up with the demands cum expectation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution era and be balanced in addition to its role of developing responsible, humane, and compassionate citizens/graduates. Especially for SA, the decolonisation discussion and the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and systems should be fully enshrined into the teacher education curriculum— the “mother” of other curricula.

Keywords: Curriculum, Curriculum responsiveness, 21st century needs, Teacher education, South Africa.