What is the law school curriculum intended to achieve?

From PrawfsBlog:

There are sev­eral schools of thought about what the first year of law school is all about. The first is the “skills” the­sis. This is the idea that the goal of the first year of law school is to intro­duce stu­dents to the fun­da­men­tal skills of the pro­fes­sion and that they can learn the sub­stance later.

…

I’ll call the sec­ond the­ory the “pro­fi­ciency” the­sis. This is the idea that the goal of the first year is to incul­tur­ate stu­dents by teach­ing them fun­da­men­tal doc­trines and val­ues on which will (1) build their under­stand­ing of the struc­ture of the American legal sys­tem and (2) allow them to have edu­cated con­ver­sa­tions in a pro­fes­sional context.

From: What is the ani­mat­ing the­ory of the law school curriculum?

Whatever the ani­mat­ing the­ory behind the cur­ricu­lum, I am not con­vinced the method of teach­ing either “skills” or “pro­fi­ciency” is too effec­tively con­veyed by classes of 100 peo­ple, a sin­gle essay exam at the end, and a pseudo-​​Socratic approach (that is often merged with straight lec­ture). Perhaps law schools could ben­e­fit by look­ing at other edu­ca­tional approaches used by other dis­ci­plines: med­i­cine, busi­ness, even engi­neer­ing. I might feel more con­fi­dent in the 1L year if there was more aware­ness and less of a sense that it’s sim­ply “always been done this way.“