Look Ahead: The Next 100 Years of Radiology Education

“Who, what, when, where, how, and why” of education 

Renowned radiology educator Richard Gunderman, M.D., Ph.D.,view 

Who is Educating

• I anticipate that the locus of authority over radiology education will shift away from the people who compose and administer tests and accredit educational programs and toward the learners and educators actually doing the work. 
• Attention will focus more on the distinctive interests, abilities and resources of individual learners and educators, asking them less to conform to a monolithic standard and instead contribute distinctively to the educational enterprise.

What Education Is

• In the future, we will be interested less in memorization and more on whether learners pose good questions and show the potential to solve puzzles that their teachers have not yet imagined.

When Education Occurs

• William Osler’s ideal that medical education should begin, continue and end with the patient.
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• In short, we will recognize that learners gain more when they are actively inquiring—and especially when they are teaching—than when they are watching and listening to someone else

Where Education Occurs

• A corollary transition takes shape as we begin to recognize that the only truly meaningful locus of education is the minds and hearts of learners, not boardrooms where people design curricula, develop new instructional technologies and produce new educational assessment methods. 
• Osler’s advice: great education must begin, continue and end with the learner.
• In the future, we will grasp that in order to teach effectively, educators must get to know their learners. 

How Education Happens

• One of the most counterintuitive future developments in education will be a growing understanding of the limitations of technology as the solution to the challenges faced by learners and educators. I expect our successors will look back condescendingly on our current excitement over the transformative power of smartphones, tablets and computers to change education, much as we smile when we contemplate the raptures that accompanied the introduction of the carousel slide projector.

Why We Educate

Most importantly, the next 100 years will bring into focus the most critical educational interrogative of all: Why?

 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “When you want to build a ship, do not begin by gathering wood, cutting boards and distributing work, but awaken within the heart of human beings the desire for the vast and endless sea.” 

Whatever response we offer to the ultimate question concerning education’s purpose, we must never fail to attend to the hopes and dreams of learners and educators, around whom the entire educational apparatus should revolve.