he paper aims to uncover the legislator’s approach to the content of compulsory education, drawing on Gert Biesta’s theoretical model, which uses three functions of education – qualification, socialization and subjectification. The analytical focus falls on the State Education Standard for General Education, which details all the “performance requirements” for students from Class I to XII, and indicates which requirements contribute to the nine key competencies introduced in 2016. And, while the normative goals for the development of the competencies seem balanced, the requirements are dominated by a strong focus on qualification and much less on socialization and subjectification. Bulgarian education focuses on learning and, to a much lesser extent, on building personalities and spaces for self-expression. The analysis identifies significant internal contradictions in the Regulation, such as the relegation of mathematics to the position of a ‘super-subject’ leading the formation of eight of the nine competences, including the competences of the Bulgarian language, social and civic competences, and initiative and entrepreneurship. These illustrations undermine the value of the competence approach and confirm that education is geared towards ‘learning for learning’s sake’, a phenomenon referred to by Biesta as learnification. What remains in the background is the development of personalities in the process of education.
David Kyuranov (Wed,) studied this question.