Professional Learning LO11932

Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)
Tue, 14 Jan 1997 23:46:25 -0800 (PST)

Replying to LO11876 -- was: Apprenticeship -- how?
[Subject line changed by host at Eric's suggestion...]

On Mon, 13 Jan 1997, Wendy duncan-Hewitt wrote:

> My apologies if something similar has been said -- I've just joined the
> list. With respect to apprenticeship programs, pharmacy is a profession
> that was based on apprenticeship until this century.
>
> I believe that the professiona has gained in some ways from moving to
> university-based education: for example, more uniformity, but it has also
> lost a lot. Teaching the art of patient care, professionalization, etc.
> works so much better one on one. It empowers the teacher as well!

I think we've got a false dichotomy driving the way that professional
training is implemented. It sounds to me like the current academic
curriculum is doing a better job of imparting *explicit* knowledge about
the practice of pharmacy than apprenticeship did, but apprenticeship did a
better job of imparting *tacit* knowledge. It's clear to me that we need
*both*, and that neither approach can be hacked to do a good job of
providing both at the same time..

Perhaps professional education needs to be completely restructured so that
it includes both apprenticeship and formal education *at the same time*.
The main barrier to this that I see is that this would necessarily
lengthen the training period and thereby make it more expensive (one of
the reasons, for example, that doctors expect to be paid so highly is that
they actually forego quite a bit of income during the lengthy education
period, so they probably regard a good part of their professional incomes
as deferred compensation).

This sub-thread should probably get a new title. [Done ...Host]

-- 

Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>