Aptitudes and medical education in dark times. Part I

Abstract

Part I of the essay on aptitudes and medical education in this dark age begins with a statement: the understanding of education requires to decipher our time and recognise that the cultural order (that which makes us ‘‘humans’’) subordinated the biological order and gave form to each historical period up to the current one. This is characterised as: the exhaustion and ruin of a civilization, based on the limitless quest for profit that allows commercialisation ofthe most sublime and vilest of the human condition, and make a profit from the worst atrocities and planetary devastation. How to characterise the education that coexist ‘‘silently’’ with suchdegradation? As passive and permissive on having to fulfil its social role (real, not idealised)of reproducing prevailing ideas and practices, and now the degrading attributes: passivity, individualism, competitiveness, consumerism that underlie the collapse of civilization.Prevalent education is passive because it ignores the life experience of students. It promotesan ephemeral learning without direction, based upon an idea of knowledge as the ingestionand retention of information. The characters of passive education are specified in terms of programs, profiles, school activities, evaluation, idea of progress, and social consequences (in which the current fashion phase are professional competences), which far from promo-ting the spiritual, intellectual and moral improvement of human condition, are "involuntary a ccomplices" of the collapse. At the end considerations on the education of physicians are made and it is argued why, despite numerous improvement initiatives, it remains captivated by passive education and draggeddown by degradation.