What is the Real Goal of MT Education?

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." -- Alvin Toffler

We in MT Education often talk about what our program goals should be for the students. We ask employers what they want. The most common response to the question of goals for our programs is "we want to prepare 'job-ready' students. While that is certainly a reasonable and honest goal, I'm of the opinion that it should not be our primary goal.

I had a "virtual conversation" today with a long-time friend, a medical transcription service owner. She and I discuss the problem of preparing job-ready students almost every time we meet. With her as with most of my colleagues—practitioners and educators—we end up rehashing the same old material: too little time, too much content, what does it really take in terms of dictation volume to prepare a job-ready student, how much academic work do they need, what are the important elements of technology and industry that they should carry with them into their jobs... The list of frustrations, questions, and seemingly insurmountable problems goes on.


I would like to propose that we think about our purpose in education with a new perspective. Let's focus on preparing students who can learn, unlearn, and relearn—as many times as it takes over the span of their careers. (In his second book, Toffler said that graduates of, I believe, the '90s, could have as many as 17 different careers requiring different or additional education in their lifetimes.) Let's focus on defining critical thinking and propose and test methodologies for enabling our students to reason through the problems they encounter, in transcription, in speech editing, in their careers. After we test our methodologies, let's compile a set of best practices that we can share with other MT educators.


In my next blog, I'll be trying to define critical thinking, as it applies to our industry specifically. I hope you'll be doing the same. 


Blessings to all,


Ellen