From Knowledge to Competence: Educational Purpose in Competency-Based Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the philosophical transformation of educational purpose under the global rise of Competency-Based Education (CBE). It argues that the shift from knowledge to competence represents not merely a reform of pedagogy but a reconfiguration of the normative foundations of education. Traditionally, knowledge occupied a formative and ethical role in shaping persons capable of judgment and reflection. CBE redefines this role through a logic of performance, in which learning is measured by demonstrable outcomes rather than oriented toward understanding. Drawing on the critical theories of Horkheimer, Habermas, and contemporary educational philosophers such as Chappell, Gonczi, Hager, and Waghid, the paper explores how instrumental rationality has narrowed the horizon of educational purpose. Competence, while valuable as a means of organizing learning, becomes problematic when elevated to an educational end. The analysis identifies three structural consequences of this shift: the internalization of purpose within technical systems, the managerial rationalization of learning, and the erosion of reflective and moral formation. In addressing major defenses of CBE—its neutrality, its integration of knowledge, and its pragmatic alignment with societal needs—the paper acknowledges their partial validity while showing that each rests on an implicit instrumentalism. It concludes by proposing a framework for reclaiming educational purpose beyond competence through the restoration of knowledge as a formative good, the cultivation of reflection and uncertainty, and the reaffirmation of education as an ethical encounter. The paper contends that education must remain a human practice oriented toward understanding, not a technical system of measurable performance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".