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In Education: I have to find my truth

Anyone can have an opinion, but one isn’t necessarily based on facts.
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Marlowe Evans.

Homework is hard.

Okay, not all of it.

The most difficult part of my homework is the research. I have to find honest, unbiased sources to quote in my essays and research papers and I have to ensure my sources are authentic.

Often it’s a difficult undertaking: because I have to define the truth.

As a child, I was taught that I should “tell the truth.”

People who testify in court are sworn to tell the truth. It seems, superficially at least, that our society values truth and honesty.

But what is the truth?

There are three entries in the Oxford dictionary when I search for “truth.”

The first is the noun form, explaining the “quality or state of being true.”

The second defines truth as “that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.”

The third entry becomes slightly more complicated: “a fact or belief that is accepted as true.”

The last entry, which infers that belief can be fact, is where some public figures seem to have inserted a grey area onto the otherwise black and white issue of truth and fabrication.

Certain things seem incontestable– the fact that the Earth is round, for example.

However, some people, mostly using sites such as Reddit, adamantly believe that the planet on which we live is flat.

They deny all scientific and even photographic evidence that the world is a sphere, and insist that we live on a flat disc and that this flat disc is the centre of the universe.

So much for Copernicus.

Schools, mine included, have been trying desperately to combat the notion of “alternative facts.”

According to the Oxford dictionary, a fact is something “known or proved to be true.” Facts and the truth are intrinsically bound together– or at least, they used to be.

I asked my English teacher for the definition of truth.

She said, “Truth is something real, tangible, concrete. But there is also abstract truth.”

What is an abstract truth? If I present something as truth, something that I believe to be a fact, but that isn’t, “real, tangible, concrete,” am I lying?

The dictionary says that a lie is, “an intentionally false statement.”

When truth, fact, and fiction are put into question, it makes the completion of research assignments at school difficult.

When I write a paper, I have to wade through dozens of online sources until I find a person who is an “expert.” This means checking and re-checking the author’s credentials and the authenticity of those very credentials.

The problem that I face is that there are “experts” on both ends of the spectrum.

Somewhere along the line, truth and fact have become a spectrum, along a proverbial line in the sand often drawn along political boundaries. To believe, or not to believe, has become a strange dilemma.

Every day, politicians accuse one another of lying, and “false facts” has become a new catch phrase. The difficulty in deciphering fact from fabrication has trickled all the way down from the rants of heads of state all the way to my high school classroom.

I have to find my truth. I have to decide what to believe, because belief has somehow become a substitute for facts.

Whenever I cite an article, the onus is on me – to question who wrote it, where it came from, the existence of bias, and the author’s credentials.

Anyone can have an opinion, but one isn’t necessarily based on facts.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of opinion. But in a world where opinion has usurped fact, it has become difficult to do my homework.

Marlowe Evans is a senior student at Thomas Haney secondary and a member of the school’s student council.