One of the authors noticed some students were doing exactly the same thing. In our school, the 5th year students usually start to prepare for the national examination of medical license, which is notorious for too much stress on acquisition of knowledge. We believe bioethics needs discussion, and it should not be a one-way lecture without interpersonal communication between lecturers and students, or among students. But students are often accustomed to lectures without discussion. This is a result of a simple questionnaire survey, which we conducted before our bioethics course started.
Discussion is, with no doubt, indispensable for learning bioethics, anywhere in the world.
We have no automatic system anywhere in the world to reach the gright answer h for ethical dilemmas in medical practice. No one raised hands and expressed their opinions, until the lecturer pointed a microphone to each student. Therefore, students are not prepared for oral presentation, even though they have their own moral viewpoints in their mind. The lack of discussion in the bioethics classroom is probably due to the lack of the opportunity to express their moral viewpoints in front of others, before they came to the bioethics course. We think this is the basic weakness of current medical education not only at our school, but also at many schools in this country.