The Political Colonisation of the Cognitive Construction of Competence

Abstract

The idea of competence has different constructions in different areas of practice. Indeed, the construction of the idea of competence has undergone substantial but constrained change, in some areas of practice, over the past decade. For instance, in the contemporary competency‐based education and training (CBT) movement, competence was initially defined as behaviour, observed as performance on pre‐specified work‐based tasks. In the face of criticism, the construction has moved to accommodate those cognitive structures which are thought to underlie and enable such performance. This can be characterised as a colonisation of cognitive psychology which has occurred safely for the CBT movement because of the purportedly value‐free nature of cognitive psychology. Nevertheless, it serves to push aside the implicit values that general education attaches to certain kinds of knowledge. CBT may appear to seek to redress normative problems underlying rival constructions of competence. However, it has not confronted these normative problems, but, rather, has assigned a pre‐emptive good to education, which does not overcome or reconcile differences in the construction of competence in different areas of practice. The final quest for a better construction of competence seems to be Interrupted by the imposition of a value system which rivals other sets of values. Thus, there seem to be restricted possibilities for the transformation of the idea of competence into a shared construction underpinned by shared values about what constitutes competence.