Legal Research

Teach Your Children Well? But How?

By Simon Fodden

Perhaps it’s Jordan Furlong’s articulate insistence, or maybe it’s my own distance from active academe, but I’ve been increasingly “of the devil’s party” when it comes to the need for the reform of legal education. I’m not yet prepared to say that all the action is with the “profane” and none of it in the “sacred,” but the practical is a vital source of learning that is still held at too great an arm’s length at law school. It’s not a matter, of course, of the simple opposition of theory and practice, nor even a productive dialectic between the two. There needs to be a re-thinking from the ground up.

So what would you do? What and how would you have law schools teach your child?

An example of bold and maybe wacky thinking about education can be found in a letter that the poet William Butler Yeats wrote to his son Michael’s schoolmaster. I won’t reproduce it all here — you can read it entire, thanks to Google Books — but a few excerpts will give you a sense of it and, perhaps, stimulate you to publish here a letter of a similar sort to a dean of law who’s about to inculcate your daughter or son.

Dear Sir,

My son is now between nine and ten and should begin Greek at once and be taught by the Berlitz method that he may read as soon as possible that most exciting of all stories, the Odyssey, from that landing in Ithaca to the end. Grammar should come when the need comes. . . Do not teach him one word of Latin. . . Teach him mathematics as thoroughly as his capacity permits. I know that Bertrand Russell must, seeing that he is such a featherhead, be wrong about everything, but as I have no mathematics I cannot prove it. I do not want my son to be as helpless. Do not teach him one word of geography. He has lived on the Alps, crossed a number of rivers. . . Do not teach him a word of history. I shall take him to Shakespeare’s history plays, if a commercialised theatre permit, and give him all the historical novels of Dumas, and if he cannot pick up the rest he is a fool. Don’t teach him one word of science, he can get all he wants in the newspapers and in any case it is no job for a gentleman. . . If you will not do what I say, whether the curriculum or your own will restrain, and my son comes from school a smatterer like his father, may your soul lie chained on the Red Sea bottom.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 10, 2009 (boomark / email).