The tasks ahead in this regard can be summarized as follows:
1 The usual class hours of students and the usual departmental
seminar hours of residents and staff must be reduced. The
remaining hours must be spent between the educator and the
educated on a one-on-one basis in order to make up for individual
inadequacies, necessities, and demands.
2 Textbooks must be shortened, and their number must be
increased. The books to be written in this respect can be divided
into two levels:
Level 1: Condensed textbooks that contain only basic principles
and mechanisms (new generation textbooks).
Level 2: Less basic books, workshops, and course programs
on academic disciplines and sub-disciplines for residents and
staff that contain more details.
3 New, digital/visual sources of information (extra-textual sources),
such as videos, animations, websites, and slides must be
developed. It is clear that a knowledge of software and computer
graphics is necessary in order to build useful digital databases.
For this reason, professional assistance must be sought and
necessary funding must be provided.
4 Popular science books must be written in order to attract and
encourage keen and eager youngsters (students and residents)
who have the potential to become qualified academicians in the
future. Written without the use of technical language, popular
science books are colorful books with many images that can be
understood by the general public and that give the basics of an
academic subject, as well as the subject's implications for our
daily lives. Writing these kinds of books can be harder for scientists
than writing books with deeper scientific details. For this
reason, the help of professional publishers and writers of popular
science must be sought.
5 Scientists must be educated in the principles of the “science of
the management of human resources and professional management”.
This education is crucially important for scientists of
biomedicine who have no background in social and anthropological
sciences. Such scientists might fall in the error of tending
to use the pragmatic scientific rules that have long been used in
departmental human resources and institutional management.
Under these rules, instead of providing a flexible evaluation of
candidates according to their personal skills and qualities, candidates
can be either rejected due to an evaluation based on
“either/or” principles or employed inefficiently.
There may be many scientists who will not agree with the arguments
above. Those who do not must be reminded of a single
word: Change! “Change” is the magic word of our time. While those
peoples, institutions, and sectors who adopt this principle as a
mantra, religiously believe in it, and apply it have the advantage to
survive and thrive. Who do not believe in it and who see their jobs
as exclusively special, different, and/or immune to change are
sooner or later wiped away. Change is everywhere today: in art,
philosophy, economy, commerce, lifestyle, daily life, and, of course,
in science and science education. Change is a liberal and democratic
process. Change itself is subject to change. Changes do not take
place slowly and according to certain traditional rules as was the
case in the past. Today, more often than not, changes do not even
recognize the traditional rules. Change brings about new rules, and
this process happens very quickly in a global world. If we as scientists
do not take immediate action in setting our own new rules
in science education, and if we do not put these new rules into
practice soon, the inevitable consequence will be that we will find
ourselves and our students caught up in an irreversibly destructive
and fatal change (i.e., both the loss of scientists in abstract terms
and the increase of patient mortality in concrete terms) that sets its
own rules, just like the Arab spring.