Brad, I have observed that you are lazy and don't care what your lack of attention says about you. I know where you went to school, but conflating having attended school with being educated is a mistake.
Graduating from high school, college, and law school means someone completed the formal requirements of those programs and received the corresponding credentials.
That is evidence of schooling, not proof of being educated.
Education is the durable capacity to learn, reason, distinguish signal from noise, integrate knowledge across domains, and revise beliefs when evidence requires it.
Degrees record that a person sat through a curriculum and satisfied its gatekeepers at a particular time. They do not guarantee any of those capacities.
- High school completion is supposed to show basic literacy, numeracy, and persistence through a standardized program. We could both cite examples where that has not proven to be the case, can't we?
- A bachelor’s degree shows the person finished a set of courses, usually with some specialization. That's all it demonstrates.
- A law degree shows they were taught about a specific professional method: reading cases, applying rules to facts, writing in a prescribed style, and arguing within an existing legal framework.
None of that automatically produces breadth, judgment, historical perspective, or intellectual honesty. A person can graduate all three while remaining narrowly trained, ideologically captured, or unable to think.
Modern societies treat credentials as a convenient proxy because they are easy to count. They are also easy to fake.
Educational Institutions have incentives to expand access and inflate grades.
Employers and the public have incentives to treat the degree as a filter rather than inspect the actual mind.
The result is credentialism: the belief that the certificate is education.
That belief fails in both directions.
Plenty of people are better read, more rigorous, and more useful than some JDs. Plenty of people with all three degrees cannot explain the assumptions behind their own field, cannot evaluate a statistical claim, and have never seriously engaged ideas that contradict their biases.
Law school is a particularly clear example. It does not reliably produce people who understand logic, economics, history, science, or the limits of law itself.
The same pattern appears in other professional schools.
Schooling can be part of education when the institution is rigorous and the student is curious.
It is not the same thing as being eduated. The test is what the person can do, and how they think, years after the last exam.
