Ever since Abraham Flexner's critical I910 report on American medical schools, there have been sporadic efforts to reform medical education. But issues that Flexner addressed were not given serious attention in veterinary education until the 1960s, and societal changes, especially the replacement of horse power with internal combustion engines after World War I and the emergence during the 1920s of a public demand for small animal practitioners, had a greater influence on veterinary education. The quality of veterinary teaching and research have improved steadily since the 1960s, but efforts to improve curriculum format have had limited success. More innovative attempts tended to gradually regress to traditional, more conservative formats, and what was accomplished often was mostly cosmetic: tinkering with course credits and sequences, packing courses with more subject material, and limiting or squeezing out of the curriculum marginal subjects once thought important to the education of a well-rounded veterinarian (eg, genetics, nutrition, livestock economics, jurisprudence, ethics, scientific speaking, and writing).
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