Are knowledge in competency-based education still necessary?

Abstract

Competency-based education is one of the ways to address the relevance and quality of education in general and professional formation in particular. The understanding of one's own competencies as well as the implementation of such approach is assumed by some authors and institutions and questioned by others. In this framework, knowledge is sometimes explicitly or implicitly undervalued as a necessary and relevant component of all competencies. The article uses the methods of documentary analysis of content and analytic-synthetic in order to critically evaluate the various theoretical positions in this regard. It is considered that knowledge can not be tightly related to a memoristic approach that obligatorily neglects performance and know-how in context, while critically assessing the exaggeration of the importance of skills and abilities but disconnected from the necessary theoretical support that they offer to them the knowledge, runs the risk of stimulating an unfounded empiricism and practicism; concluding that knowledge constitutes the basis of the competency-based education as indispensable and irreligible components in the quality, rigor and integrality of such formation.