Development of Skills or Transfer of Knowledge: About the Need to Overcome a Curriculum Antinomy in Higher Education

Abstract

The reorganization of higher education, known as the Bologna Process, is in its second decade of implementation. After a period of intense discussion on the adopted principles and paths followed, the institutional operation reached a certain stabilization, which does not mean the extinction of conceptual issues that have been associated with it regarding, in particular, the curricular organization. The antinomy that, recursively, is established between “knowledge” and “competencies” is one of those issues, interrogating what is the place of “objectives”. In the present article, which focuses particularly on higher education, this double issue is debated, in light of cognitive theory, exploiting the curricular identity of each of the notions and defending the relevance of the three in the current curricular vocabulary.