Flexner Report

Although Abraham Flexner is best known for his 1910 report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, he also promoted school reform through a high-profile report published in 1916, titled, A Modern School. Flexner prepared these reports and others with the support of the General Education Board, a Rockefeller-backed philanthropic foundation that promoted education reform, and for which he served as assistant secretary for a decade and a half. Flexner's attempts to improve medical education and K–12 schooling manifested values associated with Progressive era reforms, including faith in scientific expertise, professionalism, and national models of efficiency.

Flexner generated his recommendations for the improvement of medical education from an extensive study of medical schools around the country. Although his recommendations closely resembled the model in place at Johns Hopkins University, they effectively represented the culmination of several trends in medical education. Chief among Flexner's recommendations for medical schools were university affiliation, stricter admissions standards, a curriculum comprised of 2 years of basic science followed by 2 years of clinical experiences, a full-time, fully salaried medical faculty unencumbered by the need to supplement their income with part-time practice, and an emphasis on clinical and laboratory research. Flexner envisioned medical schools that contributed to and disseminated scientific research through teaching hospitals. Medical schools that met Flexner's criteria would set the standard for medical education and research in the country.

Flexner's proposals for the “modern school” were influenced by his experience conducting a school earlier in his career and were informed by suggestions and input that he solicited from influential and mostly progressive education professors of his day. In The Modern School, Flexner rejected academic formalism and appeal to tradition as rationales for education [Page 399]practice. He recommended instead that modern education engage students in genuine activities. He would organize the school curriculum around four areas, science, industry, aesthetics, and civics, and he called for correlation between and among them. For Flexner, subject matter would be included in the curriculum only to the extent that it contributed to developing students' understanding of science, industry, aesthetics, and civics. The extracurriculum of Flexner's modern school would include gymnastics and other sports.

In the most controversial section of his essay, Flexner advocated omitting from the modern school curriculum aspects of mathematics, history, and literature that held limited pertinence to real life, and also favored the categorical elimination from the school curriculum of the study of Latin and Greek and of formal grammar. These proposals drew harsh criticism from academic traditionalists, especially classicists. Flexner also criticized progressive education for preserving too much of the traditional academic curriculum. The primary aim of Flexner's Modern School was developing the power of the intellect through real tasks.

Echoing his proposals for medical education, Flexner envisioned the Modern School as a laboratory where educational problems would be studied scientifically, where state-of-the-art teacher training would occur, and from which improved educational practices would be disseminated to other schools. Because of his proposals, the Lincoln School was established at Teachers College, Columbia University, to operationalize Flexner's vision.

...