The modern student, we gather, is bored by the lectures he has to attend, and a genuine interest in his work, or a real scientific curiosity, is rare. Nevertheless, having the fear of the examiner before his eyes, he reads hard, but the whole system of examinations is "soul-killing, destroying originality, destroying continuity, and bestowing the prize on the man who patiently `swots' up his subjects and mechanically gives forth the answers he has been told to give." That lectures often cause boredom is true enough, but that is not altogether the fault of the student. That the passing of examinations is to a considerable extent a mechanical art cannot be denied, but that is mainly the fault not of the system, but of the way in which it is too often applied. As long as mere book knowledge is accepted as a passport by those who guard the portals of medicine, so long will cramming continue.
What the above excerpt describes is surprisingly familiar, don't you find ? And what is even more surprising is its origin : BMJ 1905;ii:971 !!!
Could it be that today's medical education in Malta is not all that different from what medical education was in the UK more than a century ago ?
Answers on a postcard or, rather, a blog comment !
3 comments:
I think that's true for most academic subjects actually.
Mind you, our examinations also have a heavy practical element in them, but I don't know how easy it is to "vomit" information for that.
How true! Education in Malta at all levels seems to be primarily a matter of recalling detailed factual information and spitting it back out. This is even more so at university level. Complacency amoung our university lecturers is the norm. Of course one could argue that since our graduates are being sucked up by UK NHS Trusts, that we must be doing something right: we are making good doctors, are we not?
I have a rather more cynical view. Perhaps our young doctors are finding it so easy to get jobs in the UK because EU law prohibits NHS Trusts from discriminating on the basis of name, ethnicity or nationality. Bit unfair on the Brits, as they can't pick and choose only their own graduates, but great for us. If you want to read more about this, check out the MMC debacle and the Tooke report on the BMJ website.
So if a Maltese doctor is interviewing for a post in competition with a Polish, Czech, German or Estonian doctor, it is quite possible that the Maltese chap will impress the committee far more based on 1. command of the english language and 2. knowledge of the british approach to medicine, which is what we are brought up on.
I am not suggesting that our graduates are not excellent, but simply that they succeed because they are the cream of maltese youth (highest A level grades) pushed through a system that favours excellent memory skills rather than more analytic ones, and then placed in competition with poor english speaking doctors.
So what's wrong with that?
Lectures, lectures, lectures! What a waste of time. We are not children waiting to be spoon fed. We need to be stimulated to read and discuss and understand and disagree. The passivity of lectures really gets to me. As your quote from over a hundred years ago shows, not much has changed. Plus we have to deal with 8am cancelled lectures, boring, droning lectures (remember histology anyone?), to say nothing about the irrelevant ones (Biochemistry comes to mind). I had read somewhere that we recall very little of what we hear in a lecture and that the best way to recall is to interact with the material, use it, even teach it. My extreme view is: get rid of ALL (or almost all) lectures and replace them with critical thinking sessions or case discussions or tutorials or donut rounds, whatever you want to call them, as long as they are sessions where we, the students are expected to think.
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