Theodore Dalrymple comments in the Telegraph on a government requirement that new nurses in the UK will have to hold a degree-level qualification beginning in 2013. Dalrymple sees no intrinsic reason why nursing can't be taught at university. But he questions whether our whole ideal of university training hasn't become culturally distorted. Here's a quote:
Unfortunately, power and status – unlike wealth and knowledge – are zero-sum games. The importance of power and status to the leaders of nursing became clear to me when I read the coursework a state enrolled nurse had to do for conversion to state registered nurse (in the days when these two levels of nursing still existed). The coursework had almost nothing in it of a technical nature: it was all a subdivision of what might be called resentment studies. Foucault was more of an influence than Florence Nightingale.
BTW, according to Amazon, Dalrymple's new book is supposed to be out any day. But you can read an extract from the book here.
