A New Era In Education Begins at Medical School

In October, a new Harvard medical education center will be dedicated. That ceremony will mark a new era in medical education here, which may spark changes in medical school curricula across the country.

For most of the last five years, under the direction of Dean Daniel C. (unclear) '46, the Medical School has been struggling to revamp a traditional curriculum, which critics say has left many students bored with trying to process an ever-growing and ever-changing body of medical information. As the climate of opinion changed, talk of curricular reform became rampant.

And while the shift from words to action has been anything but smooth, this fall's implementation of the school's dramatically new curriculum for first-year students signals that Harvard Medical School might just be in the process of bringing off the impossible.

Analogous to the construction of the undergraduate core curriculum, the Medical School's as yet untested first-year program amounts to a major overhaul of a long-entrenched classical academic program. The effects of the change will be felt by not only the incoming students, but also by a somewhat reluctant faculty which is being asked to divert much of its research time to the task of training doctors.

The new program attempts to combine the most effective aspects of the classical, more lecture-based curriculum and the small-group, problem-based New Pathways approach. The merger is being interpreted differently among the faculty; some professors see in the new prog-