The Selection of Student Nurses and the Treatment of Failures

Abstract

F I read aright the new books on nursing, if I understand clearly the chapters on nursing in various books on how to choose the right vocation, if I am accurate in my interpretation of the three pamphlets on the results of the First Grading Study of Nursing Schools, and if I properly gather the direct and implied meanings of some dozens of articles in your American Journal of Nursing and other magazines, then I must conclude that your profession is in what we call a bad way. Fortunately for you, as with us in the academic educational mills, the full realization of the mess we are in is confined largely to ourselves and knowledge of it is not yet too widespread among the general public. We are, happily, our own sharpest critics. I find from these readings that Dr. Doane of Philadelphia, Dean Lyon of the University of Minnesota Medical School, and others are firing heavy guns at the profiteering in nursing education, at what they frankly refer to as the racket. I find a good many of you are worried over your curriculum, are hacking and hewing, and cutting its long, loosely standardized forms to meet modern conditions in hospital and private treatment. I find there is a group of you, and especially of the medical men, who fear that nurses trained for modern methods will be overtrained. There is a much larger body, apparently, who believe present-day nurses much undertrained and way below standard. And I hear on all sides, from the nurses themselves, that the profession is overcrowded; that your schools are grinding out hordes of good and bad nurses, just as we have been grinding out hordes of good and bad engineers, doctors, lawyers, and teachers for years. I gather that, aside from the stress of economic depression, you are producing far more nurses than the United States can possibly absorb unless we suddenly develop new types of epidemic diseases or so increase the pressures of civilization that eight out of every ten adolescents or adults become psychopathics and need nursing care. Since neither of these is likely to eventuate, you must, I am convinced, resort to the technics now being used in many colleges and universities for the finer and sharper winnowing, sorting, screening, and selection of those you admit to your processes of education in nursing. Dean Lyon in his article, If I were King, states my position clearly when he says, 1 Read at the Institute on Supervision of the Wisconsin State League of Nursing Education, Milwaukee, June 17, 1932.