The generalization

The third principle relates to the nature of the content and teaching that schools should address. Historically, schools have focused on specific types of knowledge. They have focused on information or data, especially in the areas of social sciences and natural sciences. Similarly, in mathematics and language, teaching has prioritized procedural content, which, as we mentioned a few lines above, is analogous to information and data, but at the level of actions and deeds.

The starting assumption is that specific information cannot be the object of education. Therefore, the principle of generality defends the need for schools to emphasize the less specific aspects of knowledge, those least closely linked to information. It is called general because it does not concern specific aspects of knowledge such as data, details, algorithms, procedures, techniques, or specifics. On the contrary, it focuses on concepts, networks of concepts, competencies for human development, principles, intellectual operations, values, and attitudes with a high level of generality and abstraction. Villarini (1996) spoke of dedicating school to "higher" learning; Ausubel (1983 and 2002) and Novak (1982) called for concentrating efforts on inclusive concepts to ensure meaningful learning; Gardner and Perkins (Blythe et al., 2005: 80) referred to the need to emphasize "comprehensive" content, prioritize understanding over any other educational goal, and ensure comprehensive comprehension goals.

According to this principle, all areas should prioritize general aspects of knowledge. They should emphasize propositions and concepts over information; they should concentrate on values, not norms; and they should focus on praxis, not procedures. This is because the purpose of education is to achieve greater general and comprehensive development of the individual.

Given the above, all areas must select the most general and inclusive propositions, concepts, and networks of concepts that should be learned by all students. They must choose the main contexts to which these concepts can be transferred, and they must select the main values ​​and attitudes to be developed.

This curricular principle announces that the work, in generating a competency-oriented curriculum, must represent the beginning of a paradigm shift in Latin American education today. To this day, school remains focused on the particular, as it is totally tied to the purpose of learning. Its goal remains for the student to learn, that is, to incorporate already developed particular knowledge.

Aristotle said that defining a concept meant specifying its genus and its specific difference, that is, considering the class that contains it and the specific characteristic that differentiates it from the other members of that class. For

Aristotle, genus is the essential attribute applicable to many different species (Treatise on Logic, Siglo IV, 2004 edition: 6). In this sense, it is clear that conceptualizing implies generalizing and abstracting.

Davidov takes up this conceptualization when he refers to the general nature of every concept and when he specifies that a concept must abstract from the individual features and particularities of objects. In his terms (Davidov, 1979):

The concept abstracts from the individual features of different perceptions and representations; it is the result of their generalization with respect to an indeterminately large number of similar phenomena and objects (...) Conceptual operations and work at the level of concepts are reduced to moving "up" and "down" this ladder of dependencies.

J. Bruner, in his text entitled The Mental Process in Learning (2001: 25 and 26), maintains a similar thesis. For the author, categorization allows human beings to reduce the complexity of the environment, identify objects in the world, reduce the need for constant learning, and interrelate different kinds of events.