"The conventional concern with
matching demand and supply of skills is being replaced by an interest in the
way occupational skills are organized and produced. Historical forms of
organization and control which make skill a property of the worker have come to
be seen as a limitation on the prerogative of employers to use labour power
according to their own interests. As a result, concepts of craft mastery are
being replaced by a new logic of skill which gives the employer more control
over control over the organization of knowledge and skills on the job...".
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In this climate, the concept of competence has emerged as a
guiding principle of vocational reform. Employers and educators alike endorse
it because it appears to specify the exact content of skills to be taught in
any given area. It promises to transform the abstract notion of skill as
something one possesses into a more tractable form: something one can do or
perform. The competency approach makes skill amenable to measurement,
assessment and certification. It claims to eliminate the superficial, to ensure
quality of output, and to guarantee results by linking student performance to
institutional accountability. Thus this approach seems to be ready-made for the
educational concerns of our time. Institutions throughout the United States,
Great Britain and Canada are jumping on the competency
bandwagon.2
In seeking to make institutional training more flexible and
responsive to industry, the competency approach emphasizes vocational/technical
programs with narrow, short-term, instrumental educational objectives. Lengthy
and comprehensive programs and certification such as apprenticeships are
replaced by limited forms of training such as generic skills or skill modules
specified by employers to meet short-term goals. Knowledge and skills are
considered to be incremental and cumulative; they can be acquired over a
lifetime in a pattern of recurrent work and schooling. This organization of
learning is said to satisfy the needs of the worker for early access to the
workforce, while allowing easy passage back and forth from work to training
throughout adult life.
But the competency approach has been criticized on a number of
grounds. Some observers claim that its emphasis on behavioral objectives leads
to a "prefabricated and encyclopedic notion of knowledge" the belief that
"lists can represent the structure of knowledge" and to quick, easy, shallow
procedures. The approach, say the critics, tends to emphasize the learning of
routine, trivial material; to inhibit valuable developments in the learning
process, and to "block the development of elaborated knowledge or the formation
of a coherent political consciousness". The focus on skills and competencies
leaves little room for aspects of working knowledge that are part of individual
development, that can be modified and enhanced through practice, and that help
to serve the individual or collective welfare of workers themselves. Education
thus loses some of its potential for collectivization of workers knowledge and
the political power which that brings, and is more likely to serve the
interests of employers than those of workers.3
We have learned that when others
define women's work and skills, the definitions serve their interests and not
ours.
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