Educational Assumptions

Contemporary medical education is so thoroughly steeped in some assumptions about learning that most teachers and learners quite naturally assume there is no other way of conceptualizing the work of teachers and learners. But such assumptions are not always warranted, and in some cases they may do more to constrain than liberate educational excellence.

Among such assumptions are the following: that what the learner seeks from the teacher is knowledge and skill; that knowledge and skill are universal and paramount, whereas the distinctive characteristics of the teacher (and learner) are unimportant and arbitrary; that the knowledge teachers have to offer can be acquired just as well through recorded media as through live, in-person interaction; that it is possible to work on particular domains of knowledge and skill, one at a time; that education has succeeded when learners can demonstrate particular types of knowledge and skill; and most fundamentally, that education is a matter of transmission.

In fact, however, each of these assumptions is just that—an assumption. Such assumptions are neither fully proven nor inevitable. If teachers and learners proceeded with a different set of assumptions, they would arrive at a radically different understanding of the nature and ends of education. They would also produce radically different educational outcomes—outcomes that in important senses represent improvements over the educational outcomes we are currently pursuing.

Of course, we cannot change our deepest educational assumptions like a suit of clothes, but at the very least, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the nature of the assumptions we are operating with. For some at least, it may also be possible to move toward deeper, richer, and ultimately more fulfilling mental models of the work of teachers and learners.

Consider the first assumption; what learners seek and what teachers have to offer are knowledge and skill. Every aspect of contemporary education is deeply imbued with this notion. Teachers, learners, educational institutions, and whole professions operate with curricula that are supposed to be taught and learned, regardless of who happens to be doing the teaching and learning. We presume that learners can select courses, teachers, and schools more or less arbitrarily, and that they will learn more or less the same thing regardless what choice they make.

On this account, learners and teachers are understood to be mere storage devices that happen to house knowledge, much as a computer’s memory might be used to store a certain dataset. What matters is not the drive on which the data are written but the data themselves, and whether learners can demonstrate that they have retained them.

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Educational Assumptions

Further Reading

A Failure to Communicate?

A Review of Resources and Methodologies Available for Teaching and Assessing Patient-Related Communication Skills in Radiology

Accuracy of Opposed-phase Magnetic Resonance Imaging for the Evaluation of Treated and Untreated Spinal Metastases