An article in Saturday’s New York Times addressed the concerns of teaching methods used in law school in this day and age. The article highlights the time-honored trend of heavily teaching legal theory in law classes, and points out that many law school graduates today spend a significant amount of time at their first job actually learning how to do it, because law school never taught them.
The problem, according to The Times, is that law schools are so heavy on theory that lawyers entering the field for the first time have no practical sense of how to do their job.
At first glance, it seems somewhat unsettling that after spending more than $150,000 to go to graduate school, these so-called professionals have no grasp of what is required of them in the real world. What if this story were about medical school students? People would be terrified of an inundation of incompetent doctors in the field.
On the other hand, however, higher education cannot be entirely responsible for teaching students the practical application of the skills learned in their classes. Learning the theory behind a certain job’s skill set teaches one to think that way, and even if one’s degree does not ultimately reflect one’s career path, students will be prepared to think in the proper mindset when they enter a job that is even tangentially related to what they studied.
To a certain extent, more job skills and the practical application thereof should be incorporated into the classroom curriculum, but class is not, nor should it ever become, the sole environment in which one can learn.
When many students look back on their academic experiences in college, they remember the clubs they joined, the internships they got or the jobs they worked. They do not look back on it class by class. In fact, many concepts learned in class eventually fall by the wayside in the collective student memory. The aspects of college that stick are the opportunities that students received to test their newly acquired knowledge, not the textbook review questions they went over in the wee hours of the dawn before the test.
An institution of higher learning’s responsibility is to give the student a foundation for the career that they are going to enter into. Law schools give students a foundation of law, not automatically turn them into good lawyers. That responsibility lies in the hands of the students themselves.
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