Regionally prominent at the time. Nationally, mid-range I suppose. It's apparently climbed to regionally predominant since I graduated. Good enough for a kid like me, in any event. If you didn't attend a Top 10 law school, these rankings are a bit amorphous.
You would be amazed/horrified/pissed off if you could see what I see from other lawyers. Contracts, drafts of bills, deeds, pleadings -- you name it -- I have seen glaring grammar errors in them all. (Probably made a few too, but I had a traditional Catholic school education with the Latin and the diagramming of sentences, etc. So I hope not many.)
Some of this is due to pcs and spell/grammar checks. The writer grows far too dependent on that damned machine to signal when he has made an error and can no longer parse out the meaning of his own words.
Lazy people also do not read Strunk and White "On Style" once a year, or spend their leisure time reading well-written books. Their skills, such as they were, atrophy. And believe you me, there are lazy lawyers.
Things really are this bad in terms of ground lost in education K-12 and look to do nothing but get much, much worse. That pushes up to pressure on the colleges and universities, and I'm not sure what should be done to address it.
But it's a factor in the mix that cannot be ignored.
I do not know The Simpsons, but I disagree with the point you made, or the one I think you made. The explosion in the number of lawyers is not some Great American Brain Suck of alot more intelligence into one field of endeavor. Just the opposite. The phenomena of using the LSAT to quantify admissibility and the Muli-State to quantify suitability to practice law has obliterated the focus of the Socractic Method, or teaching people to think. We now instead value people who CANNOT think, but who sure can parrot.
To an extent, great lawyering is about rhetoric -- the ability to fling better bullshit than the other guy. You cannot hone your skills in rhetoric or debate by trying to memorize and reguritate faster, better, more without regard to any other sort of intellectual exercise. It's no wonder we see so many "patterns of lawsuits" in this country. We've trained a couple of generations of lawyers now to think and believe that rote memorization and exact duplication are the pathways to success. And oddly, to a degree, they have become just that.
Lionel Hutz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I don't know if diagramming sentences is only a circa-1950's and 1960's Catholic school phenomena. Doesn't seem very likely. But like teaching penmanship, it is nowhere to be found in American K-12 education anymore, as far as I know. (We still see some effort to teach "cursive writing", but the penmanship of my generation, my parents' and grandparents', etc., is no longer valued. And maybe that's okay, but I think we've lost ground, not gained it, as a result. I'm a dinosaur I guess.)
Public schools are using their time and money largely to babysit and to train the children to perform well on standarized tests in hopes of gaining more time and money in the next school year. Here in Cleveland, nobody even bothers to pretend anymore that educating kids is even a small part of the mission.
Well, I am not sure I agree. Elevating "communication skills" a la reading and writing above all leaves math and science, for example, without a place on the agenda. It seems like wishful thinking to me that this generation and future ones are going to be competitive without stronger math and science skills.
To a degree, though, it matters less what the content of a lesson is and more on how it is taught. When kids are educated, they acquire skills like reasoning, perception and critical analysis. When they are "taught to the (standarized) test" they learn only that which is on offer: Act A gets Result B. Over and over, in an endless loop.
nevermind i refuse to use the shift key on here, and toss my commas arbitrarily.
Style in creative writing is desirable and necessary, a la e.e. cummings. But adherence to grammar and punctuation rules are critical to legal writing, and to most forms of "professional" writing. Correct punctuation is just another means by which the writer assures his ideas have been stated with some precision, so that the reader can decipher them. Ambiguity of meaning is at least one underlying reason for most lawsuits and a tremendous drain on the nation. It is a form of waste, and should not be tolerated -- never mind celebrated Yet we do.
i went to catholic schools on the west coast in the '90s and we diagrammed sentences.
i feel that language skills are what imparts much of math and science, and that these other studies suffer from shortcomings in literacy education. not until university did math come down to teachers whose english was hardly intelligible and abstract equasions you'd be hard-pressed to draft word problems for.
to clarify my stance on attorneys, i feel they're a case in point to my earlier contention that a degree alone, or a profession alone will beget a living. proficiency in that profession and in selling one's self into that profession will ultimately be the determining factors.
in light of these roles, i don't believe education should be biased exclusively to job-worthiness. that will always be an onus on the individual. education should indicate that some competencies and knowledge is imparted in a way which is effective for study. it should judge how effectively a student has performed in this paradigm. the employer should use this information as they see fit, and the student will invariably have to establish themselves beyond the mere merits of their degree and demonstrate themselves to be the best employee for the post.
schools' effectiveness is judged by the success of their alumni; i think they do well to prepare and grease the way for their grads, however, some of those efforts are reproached here, paradoxically.
