I was struck by Paul Fullerton's speculations about the teaching of
mathematics.
I was struck even more forcefully many years ago (in my graduate school
days -- when I did some work evaluating the effectiveness of a medical
school preceptorship program for M.D.'s) by how nonsensical is the way we
teach medicine.
Even though physicians will spend their entire working lives being
confronted with people showing symptoms (and have to work from there to
diagnosis/understanding of what is happening in the body, then to
treatment), that's not how they are taught! In fact, they are taught from
almost the reverse perspective. They are taught about how the body
functions -- from the inside out, as it were -- and how certain bodily
conditions show up as certain symptoms or clusters of symptoms.
In other words, they are taught deductively how to predict symptoms from
illnesses -- then have to spend their lives inducing illnesses from
symptoms. Why?
I suspect this is another of life's questions to which I'll never have the
answer -- like, how does my wife know things about me that I don't? (and
many others.)
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>