What is the maximum amount of years anybody has spent in highschool?

[Beak Thing]

Yep. My grandfather was enrolled in an Ivy League school at age 16.

Back in the colonial era, freshmen at Harvard and Yale were usually 14 or so which is pretty incredible when you think about the degrees they received.

 

[Cyberpunk Panatela]

Back in the colonial era, freshmen at Harvard and Yale were usually 14 or so which is pretty incredible when you think about the degrees they received.

I remember my Orthopaedics professor talking about something related to this when I was in university 20 years ago.

He illustrated it by first putting a 30cm high pile of books and journals on the table. "When I qualified as an orthopaedic surgeon in 1968 this is what we were expected to know".

Then he piled up about 4 meters of textbooks, journals and reprints on the floor and continued: "This is what is expected from our registrars today." (The piles didn't contain any of our undergraduate stuff).

The situation isn't getting any better.

 

[Download This Cat]

Simple, 4 years because of all that No Child Left Behind shit.

 

[Beak Thing]

I remember my Orthopaedics professor talking about something related to this when I was in university 20 years ago.

He illustrated it by first putting a 30cm high pile of books and journals on the table. "When I qualified as an orthopaedic surgeon in 1968 this is what we were expected to know".

Then he piled up about 4 meters of textbooks, journals and reprints on the floor and continued: "This is what is expected from our registrars today." (The piles didn't contain any of our undergraduate stuff).

The situation isn't getting any better.

I had to spend a moment figuring out the meaning of "registrar" in what you wrote as it has a significant difference in British English vs. American English. In our dialect, a registrar is basically a clerk/bookkeeper who records information, most typically you encounter their office in college since basically all paperwork in an American university goes through the Registrar's Office.

Some of it really is just the scale of technological and cultural changes as well, though. Learning Latin might have been very useful in the 17th century but is probably not very useful for practicing medicine in the 21st. A Harvard graduate in 1650 would be absolutely shocked at what is part of the standard curriculum for a medical doctor today.

 

[Cyberpunk Panatela]

I had to spend a moment figuring out the meaning of "registrar" in what you wrote as it has a significant difference in British English vs. American English. In our dialect, a registrar is basically a clerk/bookkeeper who records information, most typically you encounter their office in college since basically all paperwork in an American university goes through the Registrar's Office.

I keep forgetting about that. We call that guy the Dean of Students (and he's usually in that job because he's no good at anything else).

I don't know what the US term is for this, but for us a registrar is a general practitioner now specialising in a particular field of medicine (and to do so he must earn a master's degree).

A specialist who works in a teaching hospital is called a "consultant".

General practitioners working in hospitals are referred to as "Medical Officers".

Oh, and this:

In the UK all types of surgeon are referred to as "Mr.", not "Dr."

Some of it really is just the scale of technological and cultural changes as well, though. Learning Latin might have been very useful in the 17th century but is probably not very useful for practicing medicine in the 21st. A Harvard graduate in 1650 would be absolutely shocked at what is part of the standard curriculum for a medical doctor today.

Latin was still considered worth knowing when I entered medical school. You could get along without it but certain subjects would be brutally difficult (Anatomy, dermatology, surgery)

An unnecessary multiplier of information is diseases with several names, such as Morris Syndrome/Testicular Feminisation Syndrome/Complete Androgen Insensitivity/XY Female (extremely rare congenital disorder). There are hundreds of these things.

Many drugs have two names, one used in the Americas and the other in the rest of the world (eg.  para-acetaminophenol is referred to as acetaminophen in the Americas and paracetamol elsewhere).

Duplications like the above could be sorted out by doing what the physicists did in 1958 - decide on a standard method for nomenclature (and even they weren't completely successful due to bullheadedness in certain fields).

I can go on, but in the end I don't have a solution to this - we'll probably end up superspecialising (gradually learning more and more about less and less until we end up all knowing everything about nothing, to borrow a joke of my father's).

The humanities are in an even worse state. This morning I heard some sociologist being interviewed on the local radio claim that "in the future nobody will need to know how to program, because we'll be able to telepathically communicate with computers and each other." Apparently he had written a paper on this. At some extremely expensive US university (Yale, IIRC).

Better to know your limitations than to live in complete fucking ignorance.


And this post is way off-topic.