Interesting article about US medical students complaining about their national licensing exams. I think the students have  some very valid points. Some quotes:

Dr. Peter Katsufrakis, the senior vice president of the National Board of Medical Examiners, agreed that the exam isn’t difficult, but pointed out that 871 students did fail it in the 2013-14 academic year. Besides, he said, most medical school faculty don’t have time to observe third- and fourth-year students doing a complete physical exam, so it’s important to test those skills as part of the licensing process. [emphasis added]

……..

The National Board of Medical Examiners doesn’t give feedback to test takers — in part because that would be expensive and in part because it would make it too easy for students to cheat by sharing their feedback forms, which would likely contain hints about the specific scenarios being tested, Katsufrakis said.

Well, we have a new angle on Shaw’s ‘conspiracy against the laity’.

Use of the term world-class. Usually means one of the following: you are lazy, corrupt, or deluded. Rarely, it means something else that in almost all instances does not need saying. 

This is such a brilliant graphic from an article by Doc Searls posted on Medium and here.  A sort of universal metaphor (recursion intended) for universities, education and much else. Data rich, attention limited.

 

 

Biology is short of theory compared with physics, and medicine more so. More dull trials, and less and less insight. Busyness and project management, directed by chief executives, wielding Excel spreadsheets. Alfred G Knudson has just died and Nature’s obituary tells the story of somebody who could play at natural history and then form a majestic and testable hypothesis. The penultimate sentence reads: “[his] lack of patience for science that merely repeated the work of others kept everyone in his sphere striving for the new”

“Physicists studying sport have established that many fieldsmen are very good at catching balls, but bad at answering the question: “Where in the park will the ball land?” Good players don’t forecast the future, but adapt to it. That is the origin of the saying “keep your eye on the ball”.
As complex systems go, the interaction between the ball in flight and the moving fieldsman is still relatively simple. In principle, most of the knowledge needed to compute trajectories and devise an optimal strategy is available: we just don’t have the instruments or the time for analysis and computation. More often, the relevant information is not even potentially knowable. The skill of the sports player is not the result of superior knowledge of the future, but of an ability to employ and execute good strategies for making decisions in a complex and changing world. The same qualities are characteristic of the successful executive. Managers who know the future are more often dangerous fools than great visionaries.”

I think you could say the same about education and medicine: you can say less than you know.

John Kay

Donald “D.A.” Henderson, an American epidemiologist who led the international war on smallpox that resulted in its eradication in 1980, has died.

“But it was in the fight on smallpox — perhaps the most lethal disease in history and one that killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone — that he became known around the world…”

“I think it can be fairly said that the smallpox eradication was the single greatest achievement in the history of medicine,” Richard Preston, the best-selling author of volumes including “The Hot Zone,” about the Ebola virus, and “The Demon in the Freezer,” about smallpox, said in an interview. He described Dr. Henderson as a “Sherman tank of a human being — he simply rolled over bureaucrats who got in his way.”

Washington Post

“Investment firm GSV Advisors recently estimated the annual global outlay on education at $5.5 trillion and growing rapidly. Let that number sink in for a second—it’s a doozy. The figure is nearly on par with the global health care industry, but there is no Big Pharma yet in education. Most of that money circulates within government bureaucracies.”

Wired article on Pearson.

A nice dose of uncommon  common sense:

“The world of learning is a failure factory, not in the positive sense of learning from failure, second chances and progress but one of selection, road blocks, disappointment, discouragement and real failure. As professionals, we seem to have lost our critical faculties, stuck in a time warp of old theory and models that were never verified in the first place; lectures, hands-up anyone, Maslow, Myers-Briggs, Learning Styles, Piaget, NLP, Kirkpatrick. This is not good enough. It introduces certainty where there is nothing but ideological belief and unverified theory and practice. We need to think critically and see failure as part of what it is to learn.”

Donald Clark Plan B

“For a couple of months now I’ve gathering and trudging my way through many higher education institutions’ strategic plans to think through how students’ unions might best influence such strategies in the interests of students.  Even before Brexit this was a miserable task. The level of similarity is such that it would cause a Turnitin server to billow with smoke, and the daft jargon gives the overall impression that they were written by the sort of bots that are now taking the graduate level jobs previously promised to the students that fill these places.”

Jim Dickinson

Two articles both from different areas. The first is from an interview with Paul Greengrass (he of ‘Bloody Sunday’, and the Bourne films).

“Youngsters starting out probably aren’t going to be supported and developed like I was in my early career, they’re much more likely be chewed up,” he said. “This places a greater weight on universities like Kingston, which is a breeding ground for talent, to educate kids about the importance of point of view – it’s the easiest thing to lose but the most important thing to hold on to.”

The second in Science, about a likely Nobel prize winner, Rainer Weiss.

Then, in his junior year, Weiss flunked out of school entirely. He fell for a woman he met on a ferry from Nantucket to Boston. “She taught me about folk dancing and playing the piano,” he says. Weiss followed her when she moved to Evanston, Illinois, abandoning his classes in midterm. But the affair fizzled. “I fell in love and went crazy,” he says, “and of course she couldn’t stand to be around a crazy man.” Weiss returned to MIT hoping to take his finals only to find he’d flunked out.

Weiss says he was unfazed. “People say, ‘I failed out of college! My life is over!’ Well, it’s not over. It depends on what you do with it.” He took a job as a technician in MIT’s legendary Building 20, a temporary structure erected during the war, working for Jerrold Zacharias, who studied beams of atoms and molecules with light and microwaves and developed the first commercial atomic clock. Under Zacharias’s tutelage, Weiss finished his bachelor’s degree in 1955 and earned his Ph.D. in 1962.

A later quote from the same article:

After a postdoc at Princeton University developing experimental tests of gravity under physicist Robert Dicke, Weiss returned to MIT in 1964. As a junior faculty member, he says, he published little and didn’t worry about advancing his career. MIT’s Shoemaker says Weiss probably got tenure only for his teaching—and wouldn’t get it today. Bernard Burke, an emeritus physicist at MIT, agrees that early on Weiss was a “happy gadgeteer” who “wasn’t likely to get tenure unless he did something that did something.” 

The echo of how he has lived some of his life is provided by one of his protégés, David Shoemaker

Shoemaker adds that Weiss’s foremost quality is empathy. A college dropout, Shoemaker credits Weiss with getting him into graduate school at MIT without an undergraduate degree. “He sought ways to bring out the best in me,” Shoemaker says. “He also took a rather irregular path, and I think because of that and just his nature, he is really interested in helping people.”

Now, none of this is too surprising. Science and any serious intellectual or cultural endeavour is a way of constructively catching dissent. And dissent clusters: it is not uniform across society, but found on the fringes or boundaries of good sense. But we are no longer focussed on diversity or providing a garden for play. Instead, we are obsessed with homogeneity and forcing all to the mean.

Blake got it right:

The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art & Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If not he must be Starved.