Any forum for ME FMS Dysautonomia POTs - will show you stories by the truck load of patients given shoddy, rude and useless treatment by doctors. But it's not just us. My friend who finally got her all-clear from breast cancer also received some atrocious treatment from oncologists along the way. It's not just us chronics who suffer at their hands.
Hipocrates must be spinning in his grave.
I have an hypothosis all of my little own.
I have read a lot of educational stuff and listened to a ton more. I am a great fan of modern folk like Sir Ken Robinson; that is, I agree with a lot of what he says.
I am fairly old.- 48. I am the last of the Brit kids who got through school before the National Curriculum was forced down everyone's necks and paralysed all thinking. (Thanks Maggie).
Other people I agree with are John Taylor Gatto and with some reservations John Holt
Going further back in time I love the comments on education by Albert Einstein, G.K. Chesterton and Oscar Wilde.
But two woman in particular stand out as excellent educators who both knew how children lived and learned and had a deep respect for them. Charlotte Mason and Dr. Maria Montessori
Mason and Montessori were offering an excellent, carefully crafted and child-respecting approach to education. I've used Charlotte Mason successfully with my children and am just changing over to Montessori for my youngest. These methods are well set out and really do work. But they were not universally adopted. Worse still
From my reading/research I have seen that educationalists were already concerned about the appalling standard of schools within ten years of compulsory education laws being passed. By the turn of the 20th century concerns had grown massively.
But nothing was changed.
So now we have an education system that is so broken many kids leave school illiterate.
But what about medics?
They are the bright ones aren't they? Top streamed and passed all those exams. Surely they should be good?
But look at it this way.
Most of them will have been institutionalised from a very early age. It's well known that insitutionalised people can't think independantly. They go from nursery - do this, think that; to school - do this, read that- think this. Then sit exams having learned only HOW to sit the exams.
They go to Uni from school and are told how to think there too.
When my oldest dd was signing up with the Open University when she was 16 I had a conversation with the young applicants helping woman. She told me home educated children did far better on OU courses because "they know how to think and work independantly."
It doesn't matter if you get A*s all across the board if you are only getting A*s in what you've been told to think and remember. That doesn't make you intellegent. It doesn't make you able to take in information and process it properly. It doesn't help you listen carefully and write an accurate history. It doesn't teach you the inherent dignity of the human person.
There is so very much the national curriculum doesn't teach.
When I taught medical students Sign Language they were definately quicker, brighter and more capable with the language than my other university student groups. But they lacked manners, good sense and were often horribly arrogant. All their lives people had told them how clever they were and by all the pompous gods of Rome, they believed they were better than anyone else.
I might also add that I taught Sign Language in what (back then) was supposed to be one of the top Unis under the Russell group. Even so, all first year students were obliged to take a course in how to write an essay. Seriously!
To be a good doctor a person needs to have learned a great deal more than how to pass exams and how clever s/he is.
Now, this is just my hypthothesis. But I think when an education system teaches children what to think and how to answer exam questions, rather than how to think and how to listen and discern, that you will never get doctors who know how to do medicine or care for patients. The system is compounded in the institutional setting of something like the NHS that has tick boxes to complete, but no independant or original thinking space.
The short time doctors give to patients -hence the complete inability to take a proper history - is a continuation of the conveyer belt education system they have lived in since they were toddlers.
What else can we hope for?
Hipocrates must be spinning in his grave.
I have an hypothosis all of my little own.
I have read a lot of educational stuff and listened to a ton more. I am a great fan of modern folk like Sir Ken Robinson; that is, I agree with a lot of what he says.
I am fairly old.- 48. I am the last of the Brit kids who got through school before the National Curriculum was forced down everyone's necks and paralysed all thinking. (Thanks Maggie).
Other people I agree with are John Taylor Gatto and with some reservations John Holt
Going further back in time I love the comments on education by Albert Einstein, G.K. Chesterton and Oscar Wilde.
But two woman in particular stand out as excellent educators who both knew how children lived and learned and had a deep respect for them. Charlotte Mason and Dr. Maria Montessori
Mason and Montessori were offering an excellent, carefully crafted and child-respecting approach to education. I've used Charlotte Mason successfully with my children and am just changing over to Montessori for my youngest. These methods are well set out and really do work. But they were not universally adopted. Worse still
From my reading/research I have seen that educationalists were already concerned about the appalling standard of schools within ten years of compulsory education laws being passed. By the turn of the 20th century concerns had grown massively.
But nothing was changed.
So now we have an education system that is so broken many kids leave school illiterate.
But what about medics?
They are the bright ones aren't they? Top streamed and passed all those exams. Surely they should be good?
But look at it this way.
Most of them will have been institutionalised from a very early age. It's well known that insitutionalised people can't think independantly. They go from nursery - do this, think that; to school - do this, read that- think this. Then sit exams having learned only HOW to sit the exams.
They go to Uni from school and are told how to think there too.
When my oldest dd was signing up with the Open University when she was 16 I had a conversation with the young applicants helping woman. She told me home educated children did far better on OU courses because "they know how to think and work independantly."
It doesn't matter if you get A*s all across the board if you are only getting A*s in what you've been told to think and remember. That doesn't make you intellegent. It doesn't make you able to take in information and process it properly. It doesn't help you listen carefully and write an accurate history. It doesn't teach you the inherent dignity of the human person.
There is so very much the national curriculum doesn't teach.
When I taught medical students Sign Language they were definately quicker, brighter and more capable with the language than my other university student groups. But they lacked manners, good sense and were often horribly arrogant. All their lives people had told them how clever they were and by all the pompous gods of Rome, they believed they were better than anyone else.
I might also add that I taught Sign Language in what (back then) was supposed to be one of the top Unis under the Russell group. Even so, all first year students were obliged to take a course in how to write an essay. Seriously!
To be a good doctor a person needs to have learned a great deal more than how to pass exams and how clever s/he is.
Now, this is just my hypthothesis. But I think when an education system teaches children what to think and how to answer exam questions, rather than how to think and how to listen and discern, that you will never get doctors who know how to do medicine or care for patients. The system is compounded in the institutional setting of something like the NHS that has tick boxes to complete, but no independant or original thinking space.
The short time doctors give to patients -hence the complete inability to take a proper history - is a continuation of the conveyer belt education system they have lived in since they were toddlers.
What else can we hope for?
