What a thought provoking rebuttal. Well thought out. You clearly didn't read my post carefully. I'll take Flexner on my side any day. I'm standing on the shoulders of a giant and THE icon of modern medical education. You're standing on the shoulders of a guy who runs shady for profit schools in the carribean. I suggest you read the Flexner Report this summer before school starts.
I'm actually not standing on anyones shoulders - my own two feet work just fin, thank you.
If you actually do the research on what the Flexner report actually was about, and stretch beyond what your great Dr. M forcefeeds you, you might be able to grasp that Flexner opposed proprietary medical schools that were, at that time, run by small groups of docs or even one doc with no standardization of training. His recommendations were more about standardizing medical training - a task that he felt was best done by schools being affiliated with Universities, with common admissions standards, and universal curriculum:
"At the core of Flexner's view was the notion that formal analytic reasoning, the kind of thinking integral to the natural sciences, should hold pride of place in the intellectual training of physicians. This idea was pioneered at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s but was most fully expressed in the educational program at Johns Hopkins University, which Flexner regarded as the ideal for medical education.
8 In addition to a scientific foundation for medical education, Flexner envisioned a clinical phase of education in academically oriented hospitals, where thoughtful clinicians would pursue research stimulated by the questions that arose in the course of patient care and teach their students to do the same. To Flexner, research was not an end in its own right; it was important because it led to better patient care and teaching. Indeed, he subscribed to the motto, "Think much; publish little".....
"No one would cheer more loudly for a change in medical education than Abraham Flexner. He recognized that medical education had to reconfigure itself in response to changing scientific, social, and economic circumstances in order to flourish from one generation to the next. The flexibility and freedom to change indeed, the mandate to do so were part of Flexner's essential message. He would undoubtedly support the fundamental restructuring of medical education needed today. Indeed, we suspect he would find it long overdue."
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=+2]American Medical Education 100 Years after the Flexner Report[/SIZE].
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Molly Cooke, M.D., David M. Irby, Ph.D., William Sullivan, Ph.D., and Kenneth M. Ludmerer, M.D.[/SIZE]
NEJM
