High school (and all primary schooling) is 50% teaching you useful facts and knowledge and 50% teaching you skills like concentrated work effort, sitting and listening, taking instructions and following them, and applying critical thinking to transform knowledge. MLA falls into the latter category, in my opinion.

There are a ton of style guides beyond APA. In addition to APA, I’ve used MLA, Chicago and Turabian through my academic career (BA, MS, MBA).

The likelihood of using any style guide outside of academia is low. However, in some non-academic research situations, you might use a style guide. Think about research done at a tech company where you need to document your work and distribute it for review, dissemination or presentation. Or maybe a policy institute or think tank who want to effect change at a state or federal level.

That said, teaching high school students about APA or MLA is more about helping them understand how research happens and is documented. You need to understand how to A) read what other people think about a topic and B) share your thoughts in a way that builds upon the extant literature.

This process of learning research methods also teaches you to be a critical thinker. Did the Author of Study A say something that you don’t agree with? Can you find Study B that refutes that point, or does the entire community agree with it?

Apply that concept to something like the news. You might hear a Fact like 5,000 immigrants cross the southern border every day. Is that a lot? Is that good or bad?

Now you can go read some analysis.

• A conservative author might say that all immigration is bad because they deprive jobs from citizens. We need to block all border crossings.
• A progressive author might say that immigrants create jobs or provide a net benefit to the economy. We need to permit more legal immigration.

Which opinion is correct? How would you gather more information to understand the situation? How would you build upon those two ideas to form your own opinion?

Chicago Style supremacy 😤😤

I duel degreed in undergraduate earning a BA and a BS simultaneously. The classes in my BA major used MLA and the classes in my BS major used APA. It seems like it was the same in my gen eds, arts classes tended to use MLA and science classes APA. I liked MLA better, APA wants more concise writing and I tend to be somewhat wordy. In my professional career I mostly deal with spreadsheets and autogenerated reports.

Highschool has very limited specialization. You learn lots of stuff you’ll never use because they are trying to give students a wide base of basic knowledge and skills that will be built upon wherever you go next. It is meant to prepare you for a job or a college major but not any specific job or college major. You specialize more in the next step and the further you advance the more specialized you get.

I don’t do the kind of writing that would require any formal format, but a teacher in college seemed to feel that MLA was meant to be used strictly in an academic setting. I’m not sure what I was told to use in high school, but in college all the writing classes wanted us to use a format relevant to our major. I believe I used APA but it has been awhile. Could have been MLA.

Nope, I went to University of Chicago, where of course we use the Chicago Style instead of MLA.

This format is actually used. In colleges and universities, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the MLA format is often used for coursework, for example. But students usually get lazy and decide to pay for essay writing, find https://ca.edubirdie.com/pay-for-essay-writing for help. In short, they can’t come up with anything. I would remove half of the formats altogether; they make no sense.

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I use style guides every day of my career. I haven’t specifically used MLA or APA that was used in high school, but learning that style guides existed and how to follow them was a big stepping stone.