Education in our time: competency or aptitude? The case for medicine. Part I

Abstract

This paper on the role that education plays at our time begins with a statement: to be able to understand the education's core; it is necessary to characterize its society. Distinctive features of today's world, lead us to perceive it as the ruin of civilization. Based on the limitless financial gain, education has a passive quality, responsible for maintaining the status quo as well as preserving the degrading attributes of actual societies: individualism, passivity, competitiveness, consumerism and high vulnerability to control and manipulation. Competency or aptitude are not synonyms; they are concepts pertaining radically different approaches to the practice and understanding of education. Competency represents the current tendency of passive education, where knowledge is just about acquiring and retaining information. Aptitude refers to participatory education, described in the second part of this essay. Passive education is present in the professional competencies model, specified in curricula, profiles, levels, school activities, evaluation, the concept of progress and social consequences. The argument is that this paradigm does not foster real progress defined as the primacy of values sustaining spiritual, intellectual and moral development- and is instead accomplice of the civilization's collapse.