ABSTRACT
The aim of professional education is to produce competent practitioners, so claims the self-evident assertion. If a practitioner is relatively incompetent, his professional colleagues may be aware of it and criticise him among themselves but their code of professional ethics would hinder them from doing this before his clients. Professional knowledge may refer to the mastery of the academic discipline, or disciplines, that underlie the professional practice. As professional knowledge expands and fragments, the profession itself will develop specialist branches and no new recruit can be prepared for all of these nor can competency in any of them be expected at the outset. Professions vary in the ways that they seek to assess competency. The perspective of placing the education of professionals into the wider professional and social systems may not be unrealistic but it may distort an analysis of the aims of professional education by trying to locate these beyond the institutional education process.
