Last Saturday as I sat in front of a computer for six hours grinding out a final paper, a thought occurred to me: “What on earth am I doing?”

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this thought. I have it every time the end of the semester rolls around. When big papers start coming due and finals begin chomping at my sanity like a huge, insatiable time-eating beast, I really begin to wonder why I became a college student. I didn’t have to do it. This isn’t like high school, where attendance is mandatory. It’s probably not even all that important for making money.

So I wonder: Why did we all come here? Are we really gaining anything other than uninteresting trivia out of twelve page papers about St. Augustine or sunflower classification or Great Depression union growth? Does all this yakkity shmack about general education mean anything, or does it only justify departmental budgets? Above all, is all of this studying and agonizing over grades really worth it?

You can probably already tell where this column is headed. Obviously, I’m not going to conclude that school is, in fact, not worth it, and that all of this general education a load of bunk. Obviously, because I continue to enroll for classes, I must believe there is some value in higher education. You may be wondering, therefore, why this sort of sentimental self-affirmation is appearing on the opinion page of the Daily Utah Chronicle, rather than the middle chapters of some hokey book like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

You’ll have to forgive me for waxing sentimental for a bit. The end of the year is a good time for reflection and introspection. The main motivation behind this column, however, is the fact that I really do believe in the value of college education. Though most of what we learn here has little practical application, the time we spend hashing out good grades and really thinking about the material we study not only makes us more intelligent, articulate people, but also strengthens our ability to concentrate and enables us to deal with the challenges of the so-called “real world.” There are many people, both on and off campus, who doubt the worth of education. This column is intended to help change their minds.

To begin with, education (and more specifically, college education) forces students not only to learn factoids, but also to think about those factoids more clearly than they otherwise would. Lots of people know lots of stuff, but Western education tries to make students think critically in a way that’s clear and organized. Unfortunately, this doesn’t come easily.

I cite as an example my first semester writing course. The class was fairly straightforward. During the first half of the semester there were only a couple of five-page papers due, and we spent the last half of the semester just working on our final ten-page project. This may seem easy, but for a freshman unaccustomed to writing anything longer than three pages, it was brutally hard. I spent weeks researching my paper. But after I compiled a mountain of interesting facts and quotes, I had no idea how to organize them. I didn’t know what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it. I quickly realized that merely having a large body of factual knowledge wasn’t enough. I had to analyze it, organize it and convert it into readable prose.

The result was a ten-page paper about crack-cocaine sentencing laws that, though full of quotes and statistics, presented a thoroughly incoherent argument. I tried to contrast two opposing views of the laws, and ended up making a mess of them both. Nevertheless, I learned much about organizing and writing from the experience, and I learned that understanding an issue thoroughly and forming a well-founded opinion is far more difficult than I had ever before thought. I learned that the process of carefully questioning and testing my assumptions is arduous and time consuming, but that it’s the only way to produce a clear argument.

In addition to teaching students to think clearly, college education also teaches students to work hard and deal with the slings and arrows of everyday existence. Many people, of course, argue that college is just a protected incubator where students can engage in lofty but irrelevant theoretical study on the weekdays and play video games on the weekends. However, the pressures of grades and deadlines helps students learn to buckle down and work when necessary. It helps them gain self-discipline and wade through difficult problems.

The paper I wrote this last weekend, for example, forced me to give up a huge chunk of free time so I could think about the problem of evil in Christian theology and the different approaches to the problem taken by Dante and Milton. The problem is difficult and confusing, but wading through it and carefully writing the paper forced me to focus and discipline myself. I learned much about the effort required to truly grapple with difficult issues.

Though I feel confident about having found the answer this time, invariably at the end of next semester when finals are bearing down again, I’ll ask myself once more “what am I doing?”

The answer, I hope, will be that I’m becoming a better and more articulate person, one who has a greater understanding of the world around him and more courage with which to change it.

John welcomes feedback at: [email protected] or send letters to the editor to: [email protected].