In doing so, you will define yourself to yourself and to the world. Thereafter, much of our experience, both in formal learning and in life, involves someone else trying to make us a copy of their idea of who we should be. We are instructed how to behave, indoctrinated as to what to think, told what courses to take to be marketable after college, and disciplined as to what to say and how to say it. They are just acquired as an ornament, a decoration. It is like those Russian generals, their chests covered with medals.
People wear their opinions like medals.
Several years ago, I was a participant, along with some other faculty members, in a teaching work shop. During one of the breaks, one of my colleagues was discussing a teacher who was no longer at Millsaps. My colleague had been told by one of her students that the now-departed teacher had told the student that she, the teacher, didn't care what the student's opinion was. But later I got to thinking about that teacher and decided she had been right. To put it in lawyer's language, unsupported opinion is intellectual hearsay, no more trustworthy in the classroom than such evidence is in a court room.