There are occasionally posts by law professors that reveal their hidden sturm und drang, the issues seldom discussed that annoy, if not anger them. Deborah Borman raises one such problem at Prawfs :
Now and again when a student does not like a rule for class conduct or a particular assignment we hear the cry: “we paid for this class so we can [miss class, come in late, turn an assignment in late . . . fill in the blank].” The “law student as consumer” dictating the course construct is a phenomenon that has likely been discussed here before, but I wonder if anyone has noticed an increase in these “consumer complaints” in recent years.
Why yes. It’s smeared across the blawgosphere. And it doesn’t end with law school, as former law students express their own anger at various scamblogs. Note that I hesitate to call them lawyers, as they are usually unemployed and not practicing, stunted in 3L and seething in the sense that they were induced by lies.
The attitude sounds more like someone who bought a consumer appliance that didn’t perform as well as the cool television commercial said it would. Their only responsibility was to plug it in and flip the switch.
This slackoisie grasp of education comes as no surprise. These students are the products of a generation of crass consumerism, a society interested more in spending than creating, obsessed with the purchase of shiny toys to prove their self-worth. The objects of desire, accordingly, are reduced to trinkets, things to be had for the mere purpose of having things. Education has been objectified.
The attitude toward education as a cash-and-carry business deal explains much about the slackoisie. This sense of entitlement is why they refuse to accept the proposition that the burden of achievement is theirs. They paid, or at least assumed the debt, for law school, and expect to get the benefit of the bargain. Where’s the pot of gold at the other end? Why are they also required to work hard, study hard, suffer the indignities of learning, when the tuition bill is paid in full?
But then, consider the academic response:
During my most recent consumer complaint experience, I was hosting a guest speaker who responded by telling the student that when she was in law school, one of her professors demanded that all students be in their seats by the start of class or they were locked out of the classroom.
This concept produced the response that the late student in that scenario was entitled to a refund for tuition. The guest and I indicated that when a consumer is late for other professional or paid services, such as a doctor’s appointment or a play, the consumer/patient/client/patron must also follow rules and often must still pay for that missed appointment or miss or enter a show during the second act.
Rather than tell the whiner that an education is both a privilege and opportunity for the student to prove himself worthy of the chance to fill a seat that could otherwise go to someone who would appreciate it, the reaction validates their consumerist belief that it’s nothing more than a purchase and sale of a commodity.
By comparing education to other goods and services, and putting it in the context of any other buying experience, Borman has similarly misapprehended what she, as professor, is doing there. She has reduced her role to education huckster, attracting students buyers with the half-price sales and two-fers, with the minor provisos of showing up on time.
Education is not at all the same as a attending a play, a license to watch with a condition that you not disturb other patrons who similarly paid for a license to watch. It’s nothing like a doctor’s appointment, where failure to show on time means you miss the appointment, but since we don’t pay for until the end, there’s no financial cost. Even so, that’s a cash-and-carry service; we go and pay for what we get. That’s not education at all.
There is nothing about law school that fits within the consumerist vision. You do not have the right to walk into Harvard Law School, lay your money on the table and demand a seat. You do not get to unbundle their services, buying only those pieces you want and electing, as consumers are entitled to do, not to purchase the parts that don’t interest you. You don’t own the chair of your choice in the classroom.
I’ve railed about the coddling students receive in law schools today, where Socratic method is eschewed because it harms the little teacups self-esteem to be held up in front of the class as fools and idiots, because they will surely learn that losing is a big part of the practice of law. The same coddling emerges in the complaint department scenario, where student’s expectations of concierge service from their professors is met with apologies and excuses rather than a smack of reality in the face.
I can still remember my college orientation, when the dean spoke to the incoming class and told us to look to the left, look to the right. “One of you will not be graduating.” Who that would be was up to us, and we were damn lucking to be given the opportunity to rise or fall. Our professors tolerated no insolence, and we learned quickly that we didn’t want to be on the wrong side of scholarly ire. We swiftly appreciated sitting in buildings bound in ivy rather than bunkers in a jungle, as did many of our older brothers.
A professional education is a privilege and opportunity, which students can either exploit or ignore. If the former, they will emerge capable of joining the ranks of professionals, assuming they have the chops to make it through. If the latter, hand them a dime. Why any lawprof or administrator would tolerate complaints is beyond shocking: it’s counterproductive.
Part of this education is learning their relative place in the scheme of a profession. Part of this education is coming to the realization that they aren’t the center of the universe. No law school should bear the motto, “ Nunc pretium tempor sollicitudin semper est recta.”
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My take on this has changed radically after several years of digging through the ugly insides of the for-profit trade school industry. I assumed when I started working on this consumer fraud class action against a local culinary school that the for-profit trade schools differed in kind from baccalaureate programs and professional degree programs. Now I am not so sure.
Starting in the 1980s, we entered an era of free-market triumphalism. Greed is good; government is evil, we were (and are) told. We began to systematically defund public structures, including a strong public education system.
Schools began to compete for students and revenues. At the same time, we privatized student lending and–to complete the transformation–altered bankruptcy rules to eliminate discharge of student loan debts. Those choices of free market triumphalism created the consumer-commodity model that you decry.
No question that we are poorer for it, that our education system and other public structures are degrading, and that the end result is a bunch of what-is-in-it-for-me twits who do not understand merit, achievement, and sacrifice. But you and I would be way wide of the mark to put that all on the students and their schooling. This is the inevitable result of myopic policy choices.
Law school is a naked barrier to entry to the profession. Little education takes place there.
Law school is not really a graduate program the way a PhD in physics is. A PhD candidate must understand differential equations, linear algebra etc. to even begin to understand what is happening in PhD classes. The only intellectual prerequisite to law is the ability to speak English. Law school is a de facto undergrad degree with the pointless requirement that you complete a first unrelated undergrad degree first. It is purely arbitrary that lawyers must complete an unrelated BA before they begin studying law but not accountants/teachers/engineers, etc. It should be high school to law school.
Once you begin law school, you learn very little of substance. I think that the socratic-casebook method is very valuable for learning basic legal reasoning. The only problem is, you learn this in 3 months and they waste 3 YEARS on socratic bullshit.
After the first semester, law schools should use NITA style textbooks to teach actual legal knowledge and legal skills. Then you won’t have these incompetent young lawyers inadvertently screwing clients.
I believe that the internet and globalization will revolutionize education as much as they have newspapers, yellow pages, retailing and manufacturing.
For example,
The Khan Academy teaches rigorous mathematics based subjects online for free, while offering continuous feedback. Imagine how productive the world will be with a billion in the developing world efficiently learning the world’s knowledge. This will force education reform in the West as well.
If law school was not a mandatory requirement for sitting for the bar, would you actually go there FOR THE KNOWLEDGE?
If the intellectual prerequisite to being a lawyer was the ability to think or write in English, you would have a great future with the Dairy Queen Corporation, rising all the way to assistant manager.
No.
That is the intellectual prerequisite to ENTERING LAW SCHOOL. I should have written “law school” instead of “law”, but what I meant was clear from the context. To actually practice law, you need to acquire a great deal of knowledge and skill. Very little of this knowledge or skill is actually taught in law school; but that is a different story.
Alfred Botempa, née AH, née GK, née Alfred Hawkins, née Anonymous, not that I want to encourage you, but it was indeed clear, and indeed wrong, that you were speaking of law school.
While law school does not teach students everything they need to know to practice law, and falls quite short in that regard, it does not follow that law school teaches very little or is intellectually worthless. Quite the contrary. Law school provides a great intellectual challenge and an enormous amount of knowledge needed to be a lawyer. We learn to think logically, to understand the law, to have a broad grasp of substantive law and theory, and prepares the mind to be able to learn the things needed to practice law. Without law school, we would be far worse as lawyers.
It would be very helpful if law school also taught students about the practice of law, but that gap, big as it may be, doesn’t mean that law school is worthless. Not by a long shot.
This, combined with the fetishization of “education,” in the form of various bits of parchment, and the outright lies told by admissions offices tells the rest of this story. The OP sounds like a cranky old coot.
The OP is a cranky old coot, but he’s not sitting on his mommy’s couch in the basement munching on Cheetos, playing Mortal Kombat and whining that no one will give him a $160k job and a Ferrari. Interesting phrase, “the fetishization of ‘education’,” Did somebody put a gun to your head and force you to get a bit of parchment? Is there some shame to being educated? You sound like a slackoisie.
Alfred,
1. If you learnt very little of substance at law school, you weren’t paying attention.
2. My university recently moved from an undergraduate (LLB) to postgraduate (JD) model of law degree. I did the LLB, my girlfriend is doing the JD. I can unequivocally say that the quality of candidates, the quality of learning, and the quality of outcomes is vastly better in the JD. The ‘pointless’ requirement of a first degree, and the corresponding life experience, makes a huge difference.
3. When you come out of law school (as I just have), you know diddly-squat about being a lawyer regardless.
4. I would most definitely have gone to law school “FOR THE KNOWLEDGE”, as well as for the skills, the challenge, the stimulation, the rigour, the thinking skills and the outside opportunities.