In a way, it is comical that high school newspapers publish an opinion section, considering the limited worldview inherent to our minimal life experience. In effect, we know too little to form a meaningful or well-informed opinion. We are too ignorant to know what we’re talking about – a blunt rewording of the script that seemingly the entirety of Generation X has been taught.

Even more so than most angst-ridden adolescents, I usually champion the notion that age is just a number, a poor quantification of our quality. However, in this matter, my experience writing for the Bark opinion section has forced me to reluctantly acknowledge how poorly qualified we teenagers are to weigh in on the world.

We seldom read the newspaper or watch the news. We are too engrossed in homework or – God forbid – Facebook to keep track of ground-breaking events, much less the crucial minutia of our world. And the opinion sections of the nation’s high school newspapers reflect this ignorance; it’s all there, black and white, illustrated and printed, the evidence to incriminate us.

Searching for inspiration with which to write this opinion piece, I visited the websites of a few of the nation’s top high school newspapers – the Granite Bay Gazette from outside of Sacramento, the Harvard Westlake Chronicle from Los Angeles, the Shawnee Mission East Harbinger, hailing from west Kansas City – papers with whom I am seldom impressed yet who impress journalism judges (or some such people) often.

I was shocked then, not by the quality, but by the painful unoriginality of the opinion writers on these respected staffs: I’m addicted to Starbucks, they say, we’ve become too focused on school work, they spew, as though impressed by the ingenuity of griping about homework, how life is fleeting and we should live in the moment! Who said that? Shakespeare? Aristotle? A cat poster?

Swallowing the unpleasant truth that we aren’t as informed as we pretend to be would be easier if we could suit ourselves in armors of creativity, experimental formats, or new methods of delivery. Instead, our opinion pieces are recycled tripe, handed down to us to reflect the safe, vanilla morality of the masses as adopted by our elders with the intent of camouflage.

Does that mean we should do away with the opinion section?

Absolutely not. As a cub reporter in the Nonfiction course, I was taught that one of the fundamental roles of the media is to check the power of government by informing the people, to expel corruption through exposure. We are the fourth branch of government, as guiding and omniscient as the fourth dimension that governs the workings of the other three.

I was also taught in Nonfiction, however, that a well-written story is one that cogently and concisely relays the facts, and only the facts to the reader, nothing additional that would betray any proclivity towards or prejudice against any side.

It is in the opinion section then that these seemingly diametric statutes harmonize. Whereas the rest of the paper deals in fact, a successful opinion section deals in analysis, in thought-provocation. The opinion section is the medium of the First Amendment, from which an articulate reporter may proliferate controversial views, planting the seeds of change.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, for example, was revolutionary because it properly articulated an abstract sentiment, a general feeling of disgruntlement that had yet to be written, publicized, and therefore yet to be internalized.
This is not to say that Paine or his spiritual successor is on staff, or even that any similar work shall be printed from the opinion section of one of our nation’s newspapers, but Paine’s articulation of the revolutionary sentiment is an allegory for the very fundamental need we have for cultivating opinionated citizens in a democracy. This is to say that the very existence of our opinion section then, the existence of a platform where we may freely spread opinions, is more significant than what we actually have to say.

In the climate of our time, we have a drought, a frightening shortage of such mediums. It’s no longer safe to have an opinion, even in private life, rendering an opinion section that dares to be wrong more important than ever before. In light of that awareness then, perhaps we can be forgiven for trying our hand at this most essential act. Eventually we’ll learn to seismically measure the waves of current events, to keep a weather eye on the forecast of our world, but for now, let us learn to be ignorant so that we may one day learn to be informed.