by Alexander Howard

Created on: June 19, 2009   Last Updated: July 12, 2009

While it is certainly true that the Internet contains a great deal more information than that which can be found inside the walls of our places of higher learning, there is no doubt that you cannot learn more from the Internet than you can at college.

College is not solely about teaching students raw facts and figures, filling them up with data and then turning them loose after four years. To attempt to claim that college contains more of this than the Internet is foolish; so many colleges nowadays utilize the Internet for learning and publish research there that the Internet encompasses all the hard data contained within colleges. Instead, the key to this debate is that college teaches something that every website in the world cannot: the right way to approach all this data.

Essentially, college is arming students with the tools they can use to learn further. It is about building the right mindsets and strategies by which students may approach facts, figures, events, pieces of literature, etc., so that they may critically evaluate them for worth.

Each discipline that is taught at college has a number of different theoretical approaches that students may take in examining what is laid out in front of them. In English, which is the example I am most familiar with, there is the New Criticism school of approach, the Post-Colonial school, the historical approach, each of which is used to take the contents of a piece of literature and dissect for meaning. Each of these approaches is unique, and there are many more which share in this uniqueness. The usefulness of having each theory is that students can be asked to write in a specific way about the text at hand, which serves as a way to have students think creatively about the text and differently than they might have otherwise. New Criticism, for example, requires that the critic take into account only what is in the text, not the context it was written in or by whom. Historical asks that the critics examine how the text reflects the period of history in which it was written.

And while one may reach these conclusions about how to approach texts on their own, or read about them on Wikipedia, the most effective way to learn them is to have professors who are already familiar with these processes drill students in how to effectively use them to prove a point about the text at hand. Writing essays, for example. The Internet will not drill you on anything. Moreover, it will not correct you in your

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