ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out Bacon's philosophy of legal education, analyzes its pedagogical and doctrinal elements and also examines its lessons for American legal education today. Bacon had a low opinion of his formal education, both at Trinity College, Cambridge and Gray's Inn of the Inns of Court, where he studied law. Bacon's most important early works focused on the dual topics of education and law reform. In 1985 Harvard Medical School introduced a radical new approach to medical education, the "New Pathway" Program. In 1998 a "randomized controlled trial" was conducted "to evaluate the long-term effects of an innovative curriculum, the New Pathway (NP) Program, on behaviors and attitudes related to humanistic medicine, lifelong learning and social learning". All this through a new curriculum, that moved students through the easiest rungs of the Scala intellectus by normal classroom pedagogy, but exposed them as quickly as possible to direct experience, in which their doctrinal learning could be quickly tested and improved.
