Theodore Schwartz: belief

Transcript context

…Is there a way to condense or shorten that? Say you skip undergraduate education or most of it. A person starts at age 21. They finish by age 26. I found most of what can be taught can be taught in five years. Is that not true? No, I do agree with you. I think that the undergraduate education — liberal arts — I was a philosophy and English major, which was wonderful, and I loved the expanding universe that I explored. But to be a neurosurgeon, I did not need to read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Even in medical school, there’s a lot of things that are done that could be condensed. We rotate through the hospital for two years, choosing what we want to do. If you know what you want to do, you could condense it. I do think that undergraduate education and medical school could probably be condensed into six years instead of eight. I’m not sure that the neurosurgery training could be condensed as well. Obviously, you don’t have to do research. If you’re not interested in research, you don’t need to do it. You probably could learn how to be a neurosurgeon in four years. But if you think about you being on the table, rolling into a hospital and looking up at the person who’s about to open your brain and take care of your most precious possession, you want them to have a little bit of experience. You want them to have some age and some wisdom when they’re taking care of you. If we condense everything, then that person could be 26, 27 years old. I think we have to balance education with the wisdom that’s required to be a great neurosurgeon. But as you say in your book, the neurosurgeons with less than five years’ experience — on average, they’re not as good. If we shorten the earlier process, you’ll end up with many more neurosurgeons who have, say, 11 years of experience. If someone tells me, “Your surgeon — he raced through everything in six years, but he has 13 years’ experience doing this operation, and here’s his track record,” I’m going to be just delighted. I’m not going to say I want someone who went through 16 years — some of which was hoop jumping — and he has only four years of doing this operation.…

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