Risks and Potential of Competency-based Curriculum

In this paper, I first outline the development of competency-based curriculum reform in Japan and summarize both its perceived problems as well as its potential. Next, I raise the following three points aimed at encouraging a positive direction in competency-based curriculum reform. 1)Rather than focusing on categories which conceptualize elements of competencies, concentrate instead on the specific and holistic image of a person with competencies. 2)While making clear the elements and structure of academic abilities that schools should secure within the limits of what they can do and what they should do, consider how the elements of academic abilities are taught and nurtured in the school curriculum as a whole. 3)Give priority to task creation and context setting that naturally give rise to thinking and communication activities, rather than to direct instruction on competencies, such as thinking skills and social skills. In order to realize the positive potentiality of competency-based curriculum reform, it is necessary to make clear the logic behind educational decisions in curriculum research. In this study, having reviewed the theories of R. W. Tyler, Fumio Shiromaru, and Toshio Nakauchi, I draw an outline of the processes in which the various demands on schools from society are reconciled and the contents of common culture are decided upon. This is done from the point of view of the public nature of school education and the historical and institutional constraints upon it. The reform of competency-based education, which is progressing globally, can be seen as the contemporary form of the social functional procedure and the activity analysis procedure. In the reform of competency-based education, while there is debate on the demands from within society such as the influences from the business world and those from democratic civil society, abstract agreement on such conflicts of values is reached at the level of formal abilities. In addition, there are attempts to include the abilities demanded by the adult world directly into the curriculums of schools (skills training and indoctrination). Nevertheless, concerning the development of children’s mental functions and identity formation, it is important to sift through these types of societal demands and to anticipate the development of such competencies through the acquisition of culture and through cultural practices. Therefore, it is important to include cultural learning (cultivation) that promotes the growth of the individual as a human being and to secure learning connected to participation in society. By doing so it becomes possible to nurture the capability to not just conform to and survive in society, but to maintain a sense of one’s place in society, expand the horizons in the way one lives, and to live better in society (general education and creative social control)