[CubaLibre]

Law school is putting me $150k in the hole. It's all me; my parents are too rich for me to qualify for need-based aid, even though I'm completely on my own and they don't pay for anything (except my cell phone I guess, family plan).

The good news is that it's easy to graduate from law school and make enough money to pay off your loans quickly. The bad news is that the jobs that allow you to do so are soul-sucking corporate firm law factory jobs. But, even "poor" lawyers make something like $70k or $80k a year. The loans are still manageable with that income and frankly it makes me sick how many of my peers consider such salaries "unacceptable." It's just meaningless to me.

So... all I've got to say is I will have a huge amount of debt but also probably will be able to pay it. Sorry I couldn't be more help?
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

I wouldn't really recommend college to anybody, except maybe engineers. Unless you find a school with an alternative curriculum that actually teaches you things (like mine), you're basically going for the piece of paper at the end. Whether that piece of paper is worth it to you is a decision you should make apart from cultural norms.
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

To both gambrinus and Broco, I'll respond that in actuality I agree more with Adilegian than the radical way I put my views. I'm just cynical and bitter, is all.

As far as self-education is concerned, obviously the most important educational tool is dialectic. This has been known for 2500 years and the great crime of public education (primary, secondary, and university) is that it basically compeltely eschews it for top-down authoritative indoctrination, which has never really taught much of anything of value to anyone ever. (Maybe - maybe - military discipline.)

So, what you really want is a mentor - a few mentors, actually. Apprenticeships in some kind of real-life work (not necessarily a craft trade, although that's wonderful too) is invaluable. Just someone to talk to about the books that you read and art you consume. It's no coincidence that intelligent kids, with no other outlets for their curiosity, end up congregating on forums like these with like-minded individuals and debating the relative merits of the ideas they experience. Mentors are difficult to find these days outside of school environments because schools have so completely put a strangehold on the public's conception of what education ought to be. There's been a slowly growing backlash, however.

So um... plug
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

They already have them: parents, elders, professionals and craftsmen of the community. Oh wait, I just described the educational system of the pre-Civil War era.

That these people would take it upon themselves to teach children is impossible to imagine in "today's world" only because today's world is predicated upon an educational system that has a vested interest in disintegrating these very relationships - for the very reason that they create idiosyncratic, critically thinking people.

The "average high school teacher" is literally an expert in nothing (except schooling). It is therefore literally impossible for them to teach anything (except the lessons of school: immaturity, irresponsibility, cravenness, sloth, herd mentality). At least the neighborhood plumber is an expert in something. That means he can teach it - or at least that you can learn it from him (and those may be two different things).
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[CubaLibre]

I disagree that compulsory schooling serves "average" people because that supposes that there is a such a thing as an "average" person. Most people are ordinary, but no one is average - that implies a metric against which they can be measured, a metric that is fundamentally impossible to ascertain against such broad concepts as "intelligence" or "education" across 300 million Americans in vastly different socioeconomic circumstances. Not everyone can be Einstein, but everyone has their own special genius which can only be unlocked by hard work on the part of the people who care about them the most, chiefly themselves. Compulsory schooling denies that self-education is even possible.

People these days might know more facts than our historical forbears, but the value of this "knowledge" is highly debatable. Historical literacy is norotiously hard to measure, but recall that people like Tocqueville regarded the sophistication of the common American as nothing less than a miracle. An aristrocracyless backwater where all the farmers argue like lawyers! The entire promise of the American revolution was that intelligence was not limited to an elite class of thinkers who can manage us better than we can manage ourselves, and yet that is exactly the kind of educational economy that the industrial revolution and compulsory schooling has produced.

You're absolutely right that our economic system is predicated on a rootless, immature workforce who is willing to be told exactly what to do and exactly how to do it, and then be told how they're doing it wrong, with no input of their own. And it's true that it has produced riches which are likely beyond the Founding Fathers' imagining - a perfectly predictable result, considering the Prussian model for our educational system. Gigantic corporate employment pyramids are the most efficient economic model (given a few factors that may be changing, which I point out below).

The promise of the American state was that NO principle, economic or political, will ever infringe the freedom of the people. In that sense, compulsory schooling and the industrial-government bureaucratic complex are a fundamental betrayal of the American revolution.

Whether or not this was inevitable, given the inherent weaknesses in this ideal which were exploited by the founders of the current system and the advance of technology, is beside the point now. I have two responses to your final observation.

First is that "turning back the clock" may not be so impossible, after a manner of speaking. The unsustainability of the global corporate economy is slowly creeping up on us. Peak oil and the end of cheap individual transportation might force us to fundamentally restructure our country to more strongly resemble a pre-Civil War organization. Of course, this new structure won't resemble it completely and will probably benefit a lot from the industrial developments made at the sacrifice of the common man's freedom. If we're lucky, it might approach a "best of both worlds" scenario. (This is like the "no industry > dirty industry > clean industry" progression in the environmental realm, but more broadly applied to economics in general.)

Second is that, the tradeoffs you describe are very real, and I can easily see how people might have chosen prosperity over autonomy (especially now that they are trained to as children). That doesn't mean it's right. I'd personally give it up in an instant. I don't expect everyone to be as willing as I am to do so, but I do expect that everyone look that choice directly in the face and make it honestly. These days, no one has a choice.
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[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

Part and parcel of my whole worldview is "act locally." If I can help actual, specific people that come before my bench, so much the better. If I really wanted to influence federal policy I would just become a politician. I have other like-minded people working that end.

Also, judges - even at the district level - have far more discretion than laypeople commonly believe. This isn't a constructionist vs. activist argument or whatever, this is deeply ingrained in even conservative judicial culture. A truly brilliant judge has the room to alter jurisprudence for years to come. Think Holmes or Cardozo or the Warren court, or even Posner at the circuit level.
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[CubaLibre]

You assume here that I am an idealistic student and have never been a corporate drone.
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[CubaLibre]

Personally I found that I got the number questions correct because the numbers stick out to you in a text. I recall their physical shape rather than the concepts they represent; that is to say, I didn't remember "50%" as "half" but rather as the way the numbers 5 and 0 appear on the printed page.

I have a very visual memory in that sense... when a professor asks me to identify such and such an argument in a case, for instance, I'll remember that it was in this column on this side of the page in this paragraph, based on shape.
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