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3 • Originality - Part 2

Of course some degrees of originality rate higher than others: that which rates highest calls for throwing out all the "accepted" or "ordinary" concepts and striking out in a bold new direction. For many of our national and social and civic problems, this type of originality seems to offer the only hope of permanent solutions. Fortunately, on some of these problems, some original thinking is being done—or at least started. Because it does strike at the very roots of traditional ways, it is meeting the resistance that all such bold new concepts meet when they are first launched. Nevertheless, in at least two fields, enough progress has been made to provide hope that new solutions will be forthcoming. Those two fields are education and medicine.

The new experiment in education is that of "tape teaching." The first electronics school has been established in the St. Scholas-tica Convent School in Covington, Louisiana. This school origi­nated the idea and later received assistance and support from the Fund for the Advancement of Education. St. Scholastica, by an im­aginative use of audio-visual devices, has actually managed to reintroduce to its classrooms both individual attention to students in oversize classes, and the demand that the student develop the capacity to think for himself. You can expect to see national at­tention focused on this technique in the future. It is original—it is different—and, best of all, it seems to work.

In medicine, one of the critical problems today is a constantly-growing shortage of hospital beds due to the rapid expansion of our population. Expenditures on new hospital "plants" and new patient treatment facilities have not been able to keep up. Mean­while, the daily cost of patient care has kept rising. Where an occasional community, in a burst of civic consciousness, has gathered together support for hospital expansion and improve­ment, the inclination has been to follow tradition in the new facades and floor plans, and thus to perpetuate the mistakes of the past without ever challenging the old ideas of hospital design and patient care to see if they are still the best ways. By the time the funds are raised and the new buildings are put up and equipped, the community usually finds that it is still short of hospital beds, and that the costs of hospital operations have risen to the point where the hospital still can't afford to finance itself.

But in February, 1958, a new look at the job of the medical profession and the hospitals was taken at a special symposium held at the Air University, Montgomery, Alabama. This new look consisted of a completely original approach to the problem: medicine and hospitals should be more than a means to repair damaged health; they should be considered a means to preserve good health in the first place. Out of this approach came a recom­mendation for a completely new type of hospital—one con­structed, equipped, and staffed to take advantage of every tech­nical, material, and communications advance of this atomic age. It is called the "Atomedic Hospital." This new idea incorporates sweeping changes in every phase of hospital design, operation, and administration. Such a hospital could provide far better patient care, at much lower cost, for a greater number of people than any conventional hospital. Fortunately, the representatives attending the symposium are practical enough to realize the resistance they are up against in winning acceptance for this new idea, and they are moving in carefully planned steps to overcome it. But this highly unique and original idea may be the answer to medical-care problems Americans will face fifty years from now —which is more than the present methods of constructing and building hospitals can even hope to promise!

Needless to say, the greater the degree of originality called for to solve a particular problem, the more difficult it is to get that originality. Only through extra effort can you hope to break the boundaries of routine, ordinary, everyday thinking patterns and come up with ideas that are not only usable, but also unique and different.

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