Comment on bio students
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Despite my pleasure in trolling vegans, now that we have relatively high quality digital simulations of dissection, it really is time to do away with animal dissection, especially when the chemicals used to keep them in shape to be used aren’t exactly good for the students.
I don’t object to animals being used educationally like that, when there’s no better alternative, but it just isn’t the only way to achieve the same level of knowledge now. Every high school I’m aware of in the US has something like an ipad, tablet, chromebook, or even full laptops. It’s time to phase out dissection.
I had to dissect a bunch of things in high school: a frog, a pig fetus, a cow heart, a cat… I’m still not entirely sure what the intent was. “Yup, the brain is in the right spot. Always good to check, just in case.”
If they want to teach kids knife skills they should do so in home ec. At least make something edible.
Yeah, it always seemed a bit silly in the basic biology class to have dissection in the first place. The only real benefit I saw in it was, like you said, learning how to dissect in general. A useful skill for later on, but not something that taught anything preserved samples and good photography couldn’t.
I mean it’s cool to see how things connect, how the organs are shaped in reality, but it was a shit ton of time and resources for basic biology class where you could have spent the same resources for more general knowledge. Save the dissection for AP classes, or anatomy, or courses like that, where it’s going to really be useful.
Dissection is an essential part of teaching about anatomy. It’s not necessary in highschool, where 95% of the students will never need it, but in higher Ed it’s absolutely required and digital dissection is not a replacement (but still a valuable supplemental teaching tool)
I would argue it’s a great way to get a feeler for if you can hack it as a doctor or not. If you can’t handle dissecting a preserved small animal, you’ll never make it through med school. Honestly more of high school should involve mini job simulation beyond the standard “office peon” that most of highschool simulates.
Sure, there’s a point to it in higher education, but you’d be working with an animal specific to the need.
I was only talking about the high school level, where frogs are the default “starter”. Should probably have specified, but figured it was implied enough by context
My school actually didn’t use frogs, they went with fetal pigs, and cats for the anatomy class. That’s just as a tangent unrelated to the original post and discussion.
rustydomino@lemmy.world 7 months ago
In principle I agree. In practice most of the digital dissection sims are pretty bad.