Competency-Based Education and Training. Myths and Realities, 1998

Proponents of competency-based education and training (CBET) promote it as a way to improve the correspondence between education/training and workplace requirements. CBET’s opponents consider it excessively reductionist, narrow, and rigid, as well as theoretically, empirically, and pedagogically unsound. The following are among the issues surrounding CBET: (1) the relative merits of the behaviorist and holistic approaches to CBET; (2) the question of whether CBET gives employers what they want (alternatively, the question of whether CBET’s focus on qualifications related to required performance in the workplace outweighs its costs, uncertain suitability for their work force, and confusing language/jargon); and (3) the question of whether CBET’s curriculum is being driven by government, employers, or educational institutions). Some have suggested that the economic basis of CBET neglects the wider cultural and social purposes of learning and the rights of all stakeholders to determine those purposes. Others have asserted that, with more emphasis on a holistic conception of competence and education for citizenship and cultural understanding, well-done CBET can find a realistic middle ground between the humanist and behaviorist perspectives, thereby taking another step toward breaking down the divisions between general and vocational education.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED415430

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