ACTA's Must-Reads
« Transparencies | Main | Rethinking »
Civics, clinics, and activist education
Two important and complementary articles appear in the current issue of City Journal: Heather MacDonald's unrelenting analysis of the law school clinic, and Robert P. George's compelling argument for why colleges and universities owe it to their students to make civic education mandatory.
Some of MacDonald's best work in recent years has focussed on the ideological agendas of American schools. She is especially good at identifying how those agendas come to supplant legitimate educational content--her blistering critique of American ed schools, for example, demonstrates in painfully particular terms how an obsession with progressive gimmicks has utterly displaced the goal of ensuring that teachers actually know their subjects and that they are equipped to teach them. MacDonald's account of law school clinics is the latest chapter in her growing body of work on the failures and betrayals of an education establishment that is increasingly more concerned with promoting certain political positions than with preparing students of all political persuasions for life after school.
MacDonald shows how, in the wake of a sixties-era Ford Foundation-fueled funding infusion, law school clinics became activist training grounds, in-house public interest law firms that use student labor to pursue a range of almost always leftist causes. She shows, too, how ineffectual these clinics are as actual training grounds for future lawyers--who are far more likely to need training in business transactions, and who neither acquire actual skills nor add much to their resumes by participating in them. In short, MacDonald shows that most law clinics as they exist today are expensive institutional nuisances, useful only for the political agitation of activist professors and like-minded students.
Robert George's piece dovetails nicely with MacDonald's, showing how ignorant even the best educated college students are about the founding principles of this country. Though today's college students are alive to the political implications of civility--of being sensitive to and tolerant of demographic differences such as race, class, and gender--they are woefully illiterate when it comes to understanding basic civics. They don't know why the government is structured as it is, they don't know have a firm grasp of either the founding concept of limited government, nor do they comprehend the proper place of the courts within the government. Their lamentable lack of knowledge, George argues, makes them vulnerable to the dangerous but glossy concept of the "Living Constitution," with its tacit endorsement of judicial activism and its blatant disregard for conserving the fundamental founding ideas of this nation.
Together, MacDonald and George make a case for a massive curricular overhaul on America's campuses. Undergraduates should receive crucial training in civics, and law students should have the opportunity to acquire practical procedural skills without having to sign on to a leftist agenda along the way. The one would make for more citizens who can think their way beyond ideology; the other would help create more lawyers whose skills are actually suited to the needs of their real-world clients.
This ought to be a no brainer. But civic education would be expensive to implement, and it would also contradict much of the diversity programming and multiculturalist ideology that saturates undergraduate education in this country. Likewise, cleaning up the law clinics would be a costly and ideologically fraught endeavor, one that is caught up with funding issues on the one hand, and with professors' political prerogatives (often glossed as "academic freedom") on the other. The slow work of reorienting both undergraduate education and law school training will ultimately fall to trustees--if there are any out there willing to take on these twin concerns.
Posted by acta online at January 22, 2006 09:05 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/100
Comments
It seems that the main criticism of schools of education is not that that transmit ideology but that they engender the wrong ideology. Social constructivist understandings of learning, culturally responsive pedagogies, concern for the well-being of others, and epistemologies that do not align with conservative hegemony are deemed suspect by ACTA and like-minded organizations.
I also find that these organizations produce a discourse that reduces learning to its most simple cognitive form, thereby devaluing affective and psychomotor domains of learning.
Posted by: David Franklin Ayers at January 23, 2006 05:23 PM