Means and Ends in Professional Education. Issue Paper 89-3.

Overview & Synopsis

This paper identifies two intellectual traditions that dominate professional education, one concentrating on content coverage and one concentrating on the profession's problem-solving processes. It then examines several fields of professional education, some of which have exclusively adopted one or the other of these traditions and some of which have not made such a commitment. The paper argues that, even though an emphasis on either orientation at the expense of the other can do a disservice to their students, there are several reasons why professional educators can adopt such an exclusionary stance, the principal one being that they are unable to develop strong community norms while sustaining a tension between these two traditions. The fields examined are medicine, engineeering, law, architecture, and several other professions. (Author)