This paper notes the apparent ineffectiveness of the critical response to competence-based education and training (CBET) and suggests that this results from a failure to correctly isolate CBET's unique, identifying features. It is argued that the prevailing tendency to identify CBET with ‘competence’ is fundamentally mistaken and that the competence approach is more properly characterised in terms of its philosophically naïve methodological strategy. It is suggested that this strategy is based upon untenable assumptions relating to the semantic status of statements (...) of outcome and the epistemological and ontological constructs to which such statements are intended to correspond. (shrink)

Attempts by David Bridges and others to justify certain models of competence-based education and training (CBET) are criticised on the grounds that they do not challenge the behaviouristic nature of the functional analysis system which underpins CBET. Competence strategies serve to de-skill and de-professionalise teaching and other public-service occupations by their technicist and reductionist approach to human values and knowledge. Educators committed to liberal values should eschew competence strategies in favour of learning theories inspired by the experiential tradition.

Attempts by David Bridges and others to justify certain models of competence-based education and training (CBET) are criticised on the grounds that they do not challenge the behaviouristic nature of the functional analysis system which underpins CBET. Competence strategies serve to de-skill and de-professionalise teaching and other public-service occupations by their technicist and reductionist approach to human values and knowledge. Educators committed to liberal values should eschew competence strategies in favour of learning theories inspired by the experiential tradition.

Within a year of each other, three one-volume general dictionaries of philosophy have recently appeared; when our future colleagues in philosophy look back on the 1990s they may well think of it as the decade of reference works. But however productive these years may prove to be in this genre, clearly visible somewhere around the top of the heap will be this handy, useful, entertaining, and instructive contribution from Simon Blackburn. Its two immediate competitors are the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, (...) edited by Robert Audi, and the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich. No detailed comparison will be attempted here, but two points stand out as obviously giving Blackburn’s dictionary a rather different use and flavor from the others: while containing a closely comparable number of entries, it is distinctly shorter and handier in format; and it has all been written by a single author. (shrink)

This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out.

This book offers some suggestions as to ways forward from this dilemma. Drawing on the new intellectual frameworks of critical pedagogy, feminism and postmodernism and their impact upon educational theory, practice and research, the book focuses on the changing contexts of adult education. By building on the notion of going beyond the limits of certain current adult education orthodoxies, the authors try to provide alternatives for practice. The final three chapters deal with research, focusing on a critical macro-analysis of mainstream (...) paradigms, a review of alternative approaches, and a more micro-analysis centering on the role of the socially-located self in the research process. (shrink)

This is a careful explication of and commentary on Wilfrid Sellars's classic essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" [EPM]. It is appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and beyond. The full text of EPM is included in the volume.