ABSTRACT
Nursing education in the 21st century reflects the hegemonic views of neoliberalism and corporate university business culture. With its technocratic and consumerist ideologies, corporate university culture may seriously impact the quality of nursing education and jeopardize the professionalization of the nursing discipline. Historically, nursing leaders have been sensitive in framing the discipline as innovative and forward-thinking. They have redefined nursing by rejecting or diluting the heritage of the past and adopt ideas that may be antithetical to nursing’s humanistic and scientific mission. For instance, nursing’s recent attractions to simulation, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence support this need to define nursing to a reductionist technical worldview, where doing supersedes thinking. We agree that doing and thinking are not binary opposites; yet, the focus on the development of psychomotor skills along with the dumbing down of nursing curricula paves the way to anti-intellectualism. Anti-intellectualism buttresses the precarity of nursing as an academic discipline. Nursing is viewed as labour and nursing educators remain focused on supplying the health system with docile workers. Contemporary nursing schools’ neoliberal mission reinforces the rejection of intellectual work in advancing nursing’s unique body of knowledge through theorization and critical thinking as academic leaders and educators focus on practices emphasizing students’ work readiness.
Anti-intellectualism supports the view that thinking remains in the realm of the elite, far from the everyday realities of rank-and-file nurses. Scholarly advances can hardly thrive in contexts where anti-intellectualism prevails. While nursing schools are eager to serve an increasing number of students and prepare them for the workforce, significant goals like the development of nursing knowledge become ancillary. In this chapter, we will examine the issue of anti-intellectualism in nursing and its impact on the status of nursing as an academic discipline. We examine the historical trends that foster an uncritical acceptance of anti-intellectualism in nursing. We utilize John Henry Newman’s view of a university education as a heuristic means to analyse anti-intellectualism in nursing education. Ultimately, our goal is to suggest some areas of reflection to counter anti-intellectual trends in nursing and avoid the triumph of ignorance embedded into a culture of intellectual emptiness.
