Competencies as ‘Know-how’ and Self-contradiction of Competency-Based Education Theory －Based on the Discussions of Ryle, Oakeshott, and Polyani

Abstract

The (core) competency-based education theory presented through the OECD’s DeSeCo project and its follow-up project (OECD Education 2030), stems from the motivation to pay appropriate attention to practical knowledge beyond cultivating theoretical knowledge that has been traditionally emphasized. The main theoretical sources constituting the epistemology of competency-based education theory can be presented as follows: analytical philosopher Gilbert Ryle's distinction between ‘know-how’ and ‘know-that’, political scientist Michael Oakshott's criticism of technological rationalism and his distinction between the politics of faith and that of skepticism, and physical chemist, historian of science, and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi's concepts of tacit knowledge and personal knowledge. However, discrepancy between what the OECD's competency-based education theory originally intended and its actual realization is first found in the program of the OECD projects itself; and this problem is much more seriously revealed in the process and appearance of introducing and applying competency-based education theory into the Korean higher education system. This self-contradiction that ‘betrays’ the original theoretical request of competency-based education theory is identified in the following areas: the OECD projects’ reduction of competences as ‘know-how’ to the form of propositional knowledge, in the situation in Korea, in the state's status that claims to be a rule maker, in the future discourse based on simple logic of technological determinism, and in the making of propositions and the quantification of competencies. Such problems are resolved by abolishing measures of forcibly introducing and applying a specific educational discourse by the state, and making the competency-based education theory a subject of free choice through deliberation at individual educational units.