What constitutes a medical miseducation? Ten mishaps, readily remedied.

Abstract

In adopting reductive instrumentalism as a dominant discourse medical education can be seen to have cultivated a values monoculture resistant to innovation. This culture characteristically retreats to the safety of conservatism rather than diversifying and innovating to embrace values beyond the functional - such as the ethical, aesthetic, and political. Here - where teaching displaces facilitation of learning - training is privileged over education, competence over capability, linearity over complexity, and information over knowledge. Drawing on the medical education research literature, ten symptoms of an undergraduate medicine 'compulsory miseducation' are described, paralleled by ways in which such a miseducation may be countered.