Reform at the Med School

Twenty second-year students at the Medical School have initiated a bold and exciting experiment in medical education. During the next semester, they will withdraw from day-to-day participation in laboratory and lecture work and will substitute a program of independent study conducted in small groups with cooperation of faculty advisors. Some of the groups plan to follow the normal course schedule fairly closely. But others will develop a new curriculum, hoping to eliminate the faults which they criticize in the current program.

The argument offered by these students goes to the heart of the Medical School's aproach to education; they charge that the rigidity of Harvard's preclinical curriculum and its uncritical over-use of formal teaching methods, especially lectures, stunts intellectual initiative. "We now learn more because we are told to do so than because we are curious," they wrote in a letter to Dean Ebert in December. "It is disappointing to think that our education is based upon the assumption that medical students can learn no more than what they are taught."

The students claim that the Medical School has reacted to the pressure of increasing amounts of knowledge, which it must communicate to future doctors, simply by multiplying formal academic exercises. Rather than improving, reorganizing, and streamlining the present courses, they assert, the School has only increased the number of mechanical, uninstructive tasks which these courses require. Thus, in addition to inhibiting original thinking, these formal exercises squander valuable time.

Regardless of the validity of the specific criticism -- its substance has been widely challenged -- the proposals for flexibility and independent study represent a serious and constructive experiment, which could provide valuable information to those interested in evaluating the Medical School's curriculum. The students are pledged to take examinations given to students who follow the normal curriculum; but they will use a wide range of techniques -- directed reading; attendance of scheduled laboratories, lectures, and demonstrations; consultation with lecturers and other members of the faculty; and discussion within the groups. This program will provide a needed testing ground for new methods of instruction, particularly now that Dean Ebert's approval allows the experiment to take place in the "atmosphere of co-operation between faculty and students" which the students requested in their December letter.