ABSTRACT
In the past, the belief that psychomotor expertise was all that nurses should aspire to pervaded traditional nurse education and shaped its delivery strategy. The hidden curricular outcome was the socialization of each new intake of students into the order-and-obedience culture of the traditionally trained nurse. Paradoxically, by ignoring higher educational goals and confining its provision to elementary vocational domains, traditional training seems to have engineered its own failure. Student nurses, it appeared, ‘were not getting the preparation they needed to take on the job of staff nurses’ (Shand 1987: 28). The indoctrination into an authoritarian nursing hierarchy that was embedded in the educational process left the hapless newly qualified staff nurse shorn of almost any analytical capacity and virtually incapable of criticizing, let alone mounting any serious challenge to, the status quo – as Lathlean (1987) observed. These professional inadequacies originated in, or were at least exacerbated by, the traditionally minded schools of nursing as far back as 1986, where Sweeney (1986) saw how teacher-centred approaches stifled critical reasoning and fostered negative attitudes to research, change, and student autonomy.
