I completely agree with the general notion that the enormous amount of reading required for our law school classes reduces the actual amount of thinking I do. Sometimes, I find myself wondering if the goal of this isn't simply to make me think about the law in a certain way, but to think about law school in a certain way. After all, when television encourages us not to think, it's doing so for a very specific purpose: to sell us something. Television takes us out of an active thinking mode and into one of passive watching. TV shows are then geared to elicit specific emotional "highs" in viewers at each act break - in other words, just before the commercials run. The idea isn't to put us in a state where we will come to the careful conclusion that a Ford Focus really does make sense for us, but to create in us an emotional state that makes us receptive to and excited about the possibility that we, too, could own a Ford Focus.

The Law School is also trying to sell me something: namely, that a large law firm job, with a particular salary is the absolute pinnacle of achievement for a law school graduate. My workload doesn't only leave me no time to think, it can also make me feel like I'm slow, like I know nothing, like this thing called "the law" is an extraordinarily difficult subject to master. To me, at least, this creates an emotional state (comprised of feelings like stress, lessening of self-worth, etc.) that prepares me extraordinarily well to accept what the school is selling (as well as depriving me of the time to actual think about, examine and weigh the validity of those feelings). Then again, maybe all this rain has just brought out my cynicism...

-- JohnSchwab - 30 Mar 2010