Competence Based Education and Training (CBET) and the End of Human Learning

This book radically counters the optimism sparked by Competence Based Education and Training, an educational philosophy that has re-emerged in Schooling, Vocational and Higher Education in the last decade. CBET supposedly offers a new type of learning that will lead to skilled employment; here, Preston instead presents the competency movement as one which makes the concept of human learning redundant. Starting with its origins in Taylorism, the slaughterhouse and radical behaviourism, the book charts the history of competency education to its position as a global phenomenon today, arguing that competency is opposed to ideas of process, causality and analog human movement that are fundamental to human learning.

• Disaster education
• Human condition
• Brain and learning
• educational philosophy
• human learning
• learning and instruction

• Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London, London, United Kingdom

  John Preston

John Preston is Professor of Education at the Cass School of Education, University of East London, UK.

Policies and ethics