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Teaching Politics to Nurses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Terry Bristol
Terry Bristol*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and Philosophy, Linfield College (Portland Campus), Portland, Oregon 97210-2952
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Abstract

Nurses, as other life science students, have been prejudiced against politics, imagining that it only contaminates techno-scientific enterprises. However, the new, professional nurse is aware of the need for political understanding and political skills. The transformation of the socio-economic status of the health care industry from a social service to a business provides an excellent opportunity for introducing the nursing student to political thought in a positive conjunction with practical analysis.

To generate a credible metapolitical framework, I embrace rather than avoid the current problems about the nature of the subject matter of politics. An aggressive, philosophically informed attack on the myth of autonomous, objective science opens the student's intellectual map of reality, and lays the groundwork for a proposed (paradoxical) complementarity of the two traditional models: politics as a science and politics as a humanity. This uncomfortable, middle ground position, abandoning any global Rationalism, again makes historical and contemporary case studies a relevant—in fact essential—part of political education. This is an effective approach to introducing the nursing student, whose education is dominated by classical, rationalistic, scientific images, to political studies.

Type
Specific Courses in Politics and the Life Sciences
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , August 1986 , pp. 92 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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