Competence and contents: each one in its own place in teacher training

Abstract

This paper analyses the ideological, pedagogical and semantic confusion of the concept of competence, showing that it is not a complex concept but a concept under semantic confusion. In the second part we investigate the historical origins of the word, its connections with the ideology of the market and public policies that employ it. We emphasize that this is not an innovative concept, but it belongs to a long tradition of mechanistic approaches to human action. At the end we propose a reflection on the curriculum using the idea of phronesis, which leads us to ask ourselves the following questions: What should we teach? and therefore, What must the next generations inheritors learn about neoliberalism, standards and measures? From what point of view must we analyse the training processes, subsumed in the cultural-homogeneity of the global market?