Who should learn about the law?
Everyone.
Mike, of course you’d say that. You’re selling courses called Law School for Teens.
Excellent point.
But in my ten plus years of teaching at a high school level to a wide variety of students: up and down the socio-economic scale, English language learners, academic high flyers, kids who hated school, urban kids, rural kids, special needs kids, and the list goes on, law is the only subject that greatly increases almost all student’s ability to think in my experience.
Time after time, semester after semester, I watched students come into my classes as scattered thinkers, and over the 18 weeks, become dialed in thinkers that demanded evidence for claims and understood how to back up their own claims.
It is a thing of beauty.
You see, people in general don’t usually think – they react. Thinking is a measured process, which has to be practiced over and over for someone to get good at it.
Take any sport or any musical instrument, and people understand the idea that if you want to get better at the thing – basketball, the violin, volleyball, or the saxophone – you have to practice.
But nobody believes you have to practice at thinking to get better at thinking.
Why not?
Well, I have some theories. Most people think that if you are naturally intelligent, you are a good thinker. That is not always the case.
Another theory is that most people think that if they came up with the idea, it must be right. Well, that is a ridiculous reason to not think – but lots of people do it.
David Joyner said, “In the contest between talent and hard work as to which is the more important element of success, there’s no comparison. A mediocre talent with lots of hard work will go further than a stellar talent who coasts.”
Joyner was talking about athletic talent, but I think the same idea carries over to intellectual talent as well.
The hard work in the case of intellectual talent is going through the process of learning to question claims that are made, searching for evidence, and making sure to challenge assumptions (especially your own).
Learning the law helps a person to do the thinking.
One of the things that I notice as I teach the law to high-flying academic students is that those students tend to get lots of things wrong about the law initially.
That’s okay, it happens to everyone. Law does that to people.
Sometimes, the high-flying students crumble when faced with adversity because most classes in high school come easy to them. They are not used to failing.
That’s good. Facing adversity makes us stronger as long as they get up and try again until they figure it out.
Other students relish the challenge and become better as they lean into the learning, knowing that they will make mistakes and excited to find out how that will improve their thinking.
That’s good too. When you find the kids that are excited about the challenge, you are getting closer to finding their niche in the world. Most of us love being challenged in our areas of strength because we know we can overcome those challenges to become better.
If you want to figure out if law is an area that can help you learn to think and become better, try my free mini course to try it out.
Because everyone should learn about the law.
Until next time,
Mike Traywick
Founder of Law School for Teens