Works Cited

Education is a series of building blocks. Elementary school teaches us letters of the alphabet, middle school strings them into words and phrases and high school teaches us to interpret those words and give them meaning. The thing about this way of learning is that it teaches us take to take things at face value. When your high school British literature teacher told you that Shakespeare is the best writer of all, you accepted that as true despite the fact that you found Romeo fickle and Juliet stupid for falling in love with the one man she can’t have. This is were college comes in. Where lower level schooling teaches you to understand and interpret, high level education teaches you to read critically. Did you like Romeo and Juliet? What problems did you find with it? When I started college last semester, I was surprised to find that these were the kind of questions that my professors were asking. This questioning of opinions made me realize something. As students, we write papers, we do research. For each of these, we are required to read, interpret and paraphrase someone else’s opinions and ideas. Then, for each of these, we must give credit to the original writer- APA, MLA, SSCI. But what happens when we’ve reached the points when there are no more experts?  When there is no one who knows more about a topic than you do? When you’re writing about your own opinions and not someone else’s? What I’ve realized is that essentially, we’re paying $30,000 a year to be taught how to have our own opinions. It seems outrageous, even five year old children in the most rudimentary stages of learning have opinions. However, there is something different about being able to have a professional opinion. College gives your opinion quality. An opinion has more merit when there are credentials behind it. And we all want that don’t we?, to have people listen to our opinions.