Independent study and professional education

Abstract

ABSTRACT While there is considerable debate concerning curriculum and qualifications in education for the professions, more account needs to be taken of evidence that professional competence may be related more to modes of study than to syllabus content. Though there may be pressures of innovation within disciplines which seem to legitimise heavier content loadings, the commitment to content-based courses can also be viewed, in Kuhnian terms, as covert instruction in the dominant paradigm of a discipline. Whatever the merits of this as a socialisation process into the profession, or as a means of protecting professional monopolies, it may entail passive modes of learning rather than development of competence to deal with change; to achieve, for example, the techne quality in engineering advocated by CNAA in the wake of Finniston. The strongest empirical evidence that course content is a poor indicator of professional competence comes from McLelland and his associates, through studies relating to over 50 c...