Fun fact: There's at least one study that used clicker training with student surgeons to teach these kinds of skills, and clicker training did so better than the standard approaches.

Bitching about kids these days lacking coordination while also using the same old teaching techniques is hilarious to me.

Millennials are killing surgery!

Doctors hate them!

what a knob- most of those students have shockingly been using their hands to manipulate tiny buttons their entire gd lives and if he's worried they don't have enough practical experience from darning socks or lighting kerosene lamps or whatever the fuck then this dropoff should have happened 200 years ago

Most I have seen have been using their thumbs to text and their index fingers to type. The rest just hold the phone.

Pushing little buttons in a fixed matrix is not at all the same as manipulating objects in 3D space with precision. The later is a vastly different and much more sophisticated level of spacial acuity, eye-hand coordination, and proprioception.

Think of how terribly awkward it is watching someone try to hammer a nail or saw a board who has no experience precisely directing force on the scale of inches to feet. Now imagine those tasks on the scale of millimeters, but with much more sophisticated and complex motions.

Putting on my old man hat: previous generations of surgeons grew up building models with tiny little part that needed to be precisely trimmed, glued, sanded, painted. They grew up doing crafts projects cutting paper and glueing sparkles and shells and popsicle sticks into elaborate constructions. They painted tiny little lead goblins and confederate soldiers and sewed tiny little outfits for their toys, threading needles, winding bobbins. They made latch-hook rugs and pillows. They trimmed electronic components and soldered 24 gage wires. They did Presto Magix dry transfer scenes.

Much of play involved thousands of cumulative hours of concentrated attention manipulating their world with a level of sophistication far exceeding any other creature on the planet. How quickly and precisely one can press up down, left, right, A, B, trigger, and twiddle a thumb joystick simply does not compare, when it comes to training and shaping the developing brain.

There's always been folks that are just all thumbs, we're not gonna forget how to doc because Steve switched to velco shoes.

Being a surgeon requires a lot of dexterity AND practice. There's a bunch of people operating on fruit on youtube, for example, for practice. It's an real horrorshow.

Gosh, it's like all forms of non-academic learning have been systematically expunged from our educational system!

Also, didn't it used to be a thing that surgeons in training would carry around a little pillow with a needle and thread to practice sutures on? Is that still a thing?