Educating the new professionals: "In but not of" the legal institution

Change magazine published "A New Professional: The Aims of Education Revisited" by Parker J. Palmer. In this article, Palmer looks at how to educate the new professional and he defines that professional as

a person who is not only competent in his or her discipline but has the skill and the will to deal with the institutional pathologies that threaten the profession's highest standards.

He distinguishes between professions and their institutions.

[T]he functions of a profession are not necessarily those of the institutional structures that house it. The fact that we have schools does not mean we have education. The fact that we have hospitals does not mean we have health care. The fact that we have courts does not mean we have justice. We need professionals who are "in but not of" their institutions, whose allegiance to the core values of their fields makes them resist the institutional diminishment of those values.

I find that paragraph to be very provocative of thought. How about you?

Parker then asks,

How might we prepare students to be teachers, lawyers, physicians, and clergy—to say nothing of parents and neighbors and citizens—who can help transform the institutions that dominate our lives?

He makes five proposals which I will list here. I urge you to read the article for fuller explanation of what he is recommending by each of these five.

• (1) We must help our students uncover, examine, and debunk the myth that institutions are external to and constrain us, as if they possessed powers that render us helpless—an assumption that is largely unconscious and wholly untrue.
• (2) We must take our students' emotions as seriously as we take their intellects.

• (3) We must start taking seriously the "intelligence" in emotional intelligence.
• (4) We must offer our students the knowledge, skills, and sensibilities required to cultivate communities of discernment and support.
• (5) We must help our students understand what it means to live and work with the question of an undivided life always before them.

What are your thoughts about Parker's recommendations?