Politics and Future Curriculum Reform:
· Educational strategies and objectives remain fourth in rank
among the four-legged academic stool of research, teaching, patient care
and resource generation.
· The prestige, power and fiscal strength of a medical school
has little dependence on its curriculum. The attractiveness of a school
is dictated by its investigators, its clinical services and their income.
· Teaching is highly personalized and the issue of the teacher's
identity often clouds the process. This is both good and bad. Good in that
care and attention is given to the effort; bad in that criticism and restructuring
of the curriculum is personalized and resisted.
· The logic of the pre-clinical curriculum based on historic
department lines is difficult to support.
· Curricula do not develop through rational discourse among faculty
and/or its committees. They develop through the ad hoc efforts of a few.
Curriculum committees focus on management of the current structure.
· The transfer of information through the lecture is an anachronism.
The volume of information that continues to flow in medicine is exciting.
The transfer of that information by fixed schedules, verbal formats, verbatim
transcripts, rapidly projected visuals and extracts from articles and texts
(handouts) can be replaced by reading the textbooks and the primary literature.
· Computer-based simulations, problem posing, multiple-choice
question presentation, and literature acquisition and presentation are valuable
resources in teaching.
· Medical students are computer literate. As they graduate and
continue to be exposed to computer-based knowledge sources from home, school,
hospital or office, they will change the manner in which they do their referencing,
inquiring and reading and how they apply this information in their practices.
· In the recent past the faculty have been generally ahead of
the administration in developing informatics resources. Economic forces
have changed that. Implicit in that history is that administrators are not
leaders.
· Computers in education are tools which should be controlled
by the educators. The librarians are colleagues and allies with the educators.
Information scientists and educationists should work with the content experts
in developing teaching materials. The tool is always a tool. Providing content
along with its rational and effective application is the goal of the educator.