autodidacta tumblelog

As someone who spent a long, long time in school (and mostly loved it) this wry, funny note from Dr Garry Stevens highlights some of my own questions about modern academia: “If medicine was taught like architecture, first-year med students would spend most of the year describing exciting ideas about completely hypothetical surgical techniques to their tutors. Along the way they would reluctantly attend lectures about the human body and how to take someone’s blood pressure. All this would be conveyed through slides. No-one would see a real body or apply a sphygmomanometer. One of the most popular subjects would be medical history. Aristotle’s four humours would be studied at length. Students would write long essays about the significance of Roman medicine. They would discuss the enduring importance of Galen, probably throwing in some illustrations from one of the Renaissance editions of his works. One assignment would probably ask them to make a model of the human anatomy as Galen understood it. High grades would be awarded to the best models. A few of the students would fall in love with Galen’s aesthetics, and seek to promote his ideas for the rest of their academic and professional lives.” Exaggerated, but perhaps with just enough truth to bite? One of my favourite professors gently lamented that—unlike law or medicine—due to the emphasis on originality, he had no real way to pass on the great body of architectural knowledge as a codified whole. Some hold the view that this is quite a good thing, but I consider architecture both art and science, and have wondered if too much stress on creativity and originality can be just as pathological as the lack of it?

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