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| META TOPICPARENT | name="Main.RohanGrey" |
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I found this account of the law school experience by Professor Duncan Kennedy of Harvard Law to be relevant to our discussions in class, thought I’d share. | | | Moreover, by placing the emphasis almost solely on subject knowledge at the expense of pedagogical training, administrators perpetuate the myth that “anyone can teach” and that responsibility for learning difficulties should be placed on students themselves, rather than on the teaching practices of the professors. In part, this phenomenon may reflect a cynical (or perhaps realistic) acknowledgment that the brightest legal minds largely don’t value the teaching element of their academic responsibilities sufficiently to put the necessary effort into adequate teacher training and creative lesson planning. Like Teach for America, law school administrators may perceive a tradeoff between attracting the best minds and the most dedicated teachers, and decide consciously to target the former by lowering the standards of teacher training required prior to admittance as a teacher. The failure here is, I believe, one of law school administrations, not individual law professors, much as the hyperextension of TFA beyond its initial mission as a alternative source of assistant and substitute teachers is the fault of overzealous education-reformers and politicians rather than the dedicated and self-sacrificing TFA’ers themselves. | |
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< | On that note, I only partially agree with Jessica’s claim that the “education system and economy are geared that way.” In many respects, such as the overemphasis on high-stakes testing, and the use of employability and earnings statistics as a proxy measure of relative school performance, law schools have been in the vanguard of a market-oriented, technocratic crusade against liberal, progressive or holistic educational models. In recent years this crusade for “competition, accountability and standards” has reached as far as pre-kindergarten, driven in part by a convergence of values between the wing and the so-called “pragmatic centrists” within the Democratic Party. One only needs to consider the psychological, academic and career implications of their law school transcript – which separates “winners” from “losers” based on single-letter grades determined by inauthentic assessments of poorly defined standards – to appreciate why so many teachers from New Jersey to Wisconsin are standing up in opposition to the educational reforms enacted in recent years that are leading in that direction. | >
> | On that note, I only partially agree with Jessica’s claim that the “education system and economy are geared that way.” In many respects, such as the overemphasis on high-stakes testing, and the use of employability and earnings statistics as a proxy measure of relative school performance, law schools have been in the vanguard of a market-oriented, technocratic crusade against liberal, progressive or holistic educational models. In recent years this crusade for “competition, accountability and standards” has reached as far as pre-kindergarten, driven in part by a convergence of values between the right wing and the so-called “pragmatic centrists” within the Democratic Party. One only needs to consider the psychological, academic and career implications of their law school transcript – which separates “winners” from “losers” based on single-letter grades determined by inauthentic assessments of poorly defined standards – to appreciate why so many teachers from New Jersey to Wisconsin are standing up in opposition to the educational reforms enacted in recent years that are leading in that direction. | | | | |
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< | On the other hand, as Meagan pointed out, the deconstructive legal analysis emphasized in most classes seems to actively suppress – or at best, marginalize the value of – individual judgment based on one’s experiences and values. In this respect law school is regressive, telling us that we “have much to learn” rather than “much to contribute,” while education professors around the country are increasingly teaching their newly minted students to adopt the opposite approach. Like Meagan, I found LPW to be the most useful class from last semester, due to its (admittedly not strong enough) emphasis on individual skill building, genuine problem solving and constructive legal writing. Equally, the most interesting experiences in my other classes tended to involve questions that were either tangential or beyond the scope of a black-letter law class, because they were the questions that were actually relevant to my interests, or interesting from a theoretical legal point of view. | >
> | On the other hand, as Meagan pointed out, the deconstructive legal analysis emphasized in most classes seems to actively suppress – or at best, marginalize the value of – individual judgment based on one’s experiences and values. In this respect law school is regressive, telling us that we “have much to learn” rather than “much to contribute,” while education professors around the country are telling newly minted teachers to adopt the opposite approach. Like Meagan, I found LPW to be the most useful class from last semester, due to its (admittedly not strong enough) emphasis on individual skill building, genuine problem solving and constructive legal writing. Equally, the most interesting experiences in my other classes tended to involve questions that were either tangential or beyond the scope of a black-letter law class, because they were the questions that were actually relevant to my interests, or interesting from a theoretical legal point of view. | | | I remember Eben said early in the course that if he had his way one of the first courses we would take would be on “Persuasion.” I wonder what other people would have in their ideal 1L curriculum? Off the top of my head I would imagine perhaps the following: |
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