Young people can have opinions too: Thoughts on [the Oxford tutorial system]
The educational system of Oxford University is a unique one. Instead of traditional classroom lectures as an undergraduate, one attends weekly tutorials, supported by open lectures, as well as other classes and labs depending on one's major. When I was deciding what courses to take during my time abroad at Oxford, choosing Shakespeare as my primary tutorial and creative writing as my secondary tutorial, I imagined tutorials were just British-lingo for a class. However, during the rush of orientation week—which, one year ago today, had just ended—the director, Dr. Baigent, told us that tutorials would be one-on-one discussions with a professor, centering on an essay written by me without prior instruction on the subject. This concept terrified me.
Then, my Shakespeare professor organized a pre-tutorial meeting at the King's Arms, all ten or so of the Americans in my program who were taking the course squeezed into a booth. Our professor told us that for all of our essays in the course we should not rely on outside materials at all. I became even more terrified.
Our entire lives, we are taught to rely on more authoritative voices to shape our own opinions. We are given lectures by professors and instructed to regurgitate the notes for tests until they are ingrained in our patterns of thought. We are told we need an exhaustive list of sources before our essays have any merit—as if to prove that our opinions have been supported by generations of scholars and are not inventive or unique.
Dr. Baigent explained that as we embarked on our tutorials, we would be given a question to guide our writing—one that we didn't need to answer. (This itself is a detachment from the American idea of finding a definitive answer to a question—the brash, hard-line intellectualism of America contrasted with the lush world of British free thought.) We were instructed not to worry about being right or wrong; instead, we were contributing to a rich history of research by lending our unique thoughts and opinions to the works we studied.
Writing my first essay was difficult. I labored over Macbeth and the question, the only roadmap I had for my essay: "What is the significance of images of babies and children in Macbeth?" It was difficult to resist the temptation to go to the Bodleian and find a great scholar's interpretation to mold my own.
Dr. Baigent liked to tell us that we were their peers. We, a group of American undergraduates, were the colleagues of Oxford University professors. I held these words close to my chest as I rode my bike to my first Shakespeare tutorial, my bibliography-free essay tucked in my backpack.
I won't pretend it was easy. Having the courage to contribute my own thoughts and opinions openly in a discussion with someone who taught at the second-oldest college institution in the world is not something that comes naturally to me—no matter how many times I endeavor to disagree with my professors in the written word. However, over the course of my eight weeks, I learned to trust my interpretations, to follow my independent lines of thinking down paths I never would have noticed before. I was able to utilize the text to rationalize my conclusions, rather than utilizing another scholar's analyzation. In the attic rooms of 8 Norham Gardens, as the sun dipped low over the Victorian roofs, I learned what I was capable of on my own.
I didn't realize the full implications of this drastically different approach to education until I began my last semester at Asbury last week. All of my classes the previous semester were largely project-oriented, meaning less lectures and more hands-on work. However, this semester, I decided to indulge my love of Shakespeare by taking Asbury's course on the subject. It is a different breed of class than the courses I took last semester: it is the epitome of a standard upper-level English course, filled with long-winded lectures by a genius professor. He speaks, we listen, and by some miracle, we hope to glean an iota of his magnificent wisdom for our mortal selves. I remember being a sophomore in the same professor's British literature course and thinking I would have to transcend my body to a higher plane of being in order to truly understand him. It wasn't until I began to consider this course and this professor in the context of my time at Oxford that I realized this line of thinking can be detrimental.
Consider, for a moment, Alexander Hamilton—yes, I have to use my favorite hip-hop musical protagonist as my example—and his function as an instrumental Founding Father of our country. How old was he when we adopted the Declaration of Independence—when he joined the Revolution and became Washington's senior aide-de-camp? Twenty-one. Marquis de Lafayette was 18. Aaron Burr was 20. Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the document that kickstarted the most important event in our young country's history, was only 33 years old.
We need to remove the prejudice against young people being world-shapers. Lafayette was a teenager—yes, a teenager—when he joined the American Revolution and was made a major-general. We often think of teenagers as intellectually blocked beings being puppeteered by hormones and video games. What kind of contributions do you think we are missing—to government, to science, to literature, to art, to society as a whole—because we've told a generation of young people that their thoughts and opinions have no merit, that they'll think differently, correctly, when they're older?
I recognize that I am not innocent when it comes to having a bias against young people—I am the one who convinced myself that I was not capable of understanding my professor because I was an undergraduate. I also recognize that important lessons are learned from experience or years of intense study, and it is essential to look at the history of the subject you are studying, using the opinions of scholars in the past to influence your thoughts now.
However, we should not discredit someone's ideas just because they are young and their opinions are unprecedented. In the literary realm, neither should we constrain young people's thoughts by teaching them that one interpretation is right and there is no more room for independent conclusions. The Oxford tutorial system had one major benefit on my life as a student: I gained confidence as an academic and a writer, learning to rely on my own analysis of the facts presented to me and sometimes exploring ideas that even my professor had not considered.
Anyone can be a world-shaper, even a teenager.