The Limits of Competence: Knowledge, Higher Education and Society (Society for Research into Higher Education)

Competence is a term which is making its entrance in the university. How might it be understood at this level? "The Limits of Competence" takes an uncompromising line, providing a sustained critique of the notion of competence as wholly inadequate for higher education. Currently, we are seeing the displacement of one limited version of competence by another even more limited interpretation. In the older definition - one of academic competence - notions of disciplines, objectivity and truth have been central. In the new version, competence is given an operational twist and is marked out by know-how, competence and skills. In this operationalism, the key question is not 'What do students understand?' but 'What can students do?' The book develops an alternative view, suggesting that, for our universities, a third and heretical conception of human being is worth considering. Our curricula might, instead, offer an education for life.