14 ms·

The Decline and Fall of the English Major

99 points by jonmumm 13y ago

gms 13y ago
Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? Seems like one or two classes would do.
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  I like to imagine a bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." Of course you don't need to take an English major to write properly. But that is rarely the goal of taking an English major. Very few majors are actually about the mastery of one skill.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    > I like to imagine a bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." Just such claims are made in the "You need to have a degree" / "degrees are worthless" debates held hereabouts on a bi-monthly basis.
  - krakensden 13y ago
    One or two classes would do, for the vast majority of tasks people accomplish with code. Lots of the more `advanced' topics aren't really that hard to learn on your own. Besides, when was the last time you looked at the curriculum for a CS or CSE major? There are some code courses, but also lots and lots of of writing, math, and physics.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    > bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." I didn't know this Hacker News was literature based. Interesting. Where is the non-bizarro one?
    - sk5t 13y ago
      No, it's the alternate universe HN that would be literature-based. This one is loosely oriented around topics such as general interest, startup-financing, and social/political dealings, with the fans of each occasionally arguing that the others don't belong.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        You appear to have missed my joke. This clearly is a HN that largely believes that CS degrees are unnecessary.
  - SilasX 13y ago
    That would be the normal world, not the bizarro one. Most people here don't even have CS degrees, but picked up the relevant material as a hobby or on the job. And furthermore, would recognize that such real-world experience is much more important for what they do than what you learn in an artificial academic environment.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  > Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? It's not clear to me that majors are things that are studied, especially English ones.
  - fibbery 13y ago
    I don't follow you. To complete a major you take a certain number of courses in a subject. Or are you suggesting that English majors don't learn anything?
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      If a major is a program of study, then to study a major is to study a program of study. It's possible, of course, but I don't think that's what most majors do. And English ones especially would see the subtle language implications here. (As you can see we're both already abusing the term: majors are also those that enroll in a particular program of study, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to study them.) It just seemed ironic that a question about the validity of an English major was perhaps incorrect in its use of English, that's all. Not a big deal. Not even sure if I'm right, I've just never heard "to study a major" before.
      - abraininavat 13y ago
        Thanks for illuminating the conversation by demonstrating pedantry of the type so often heard from English majors. You've done so to cleverly illustrate part of the reason the major is on its way to irrelevance, no doubt.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        It seems like you're having a bad day, so I've given you an upvote.
        pjbrunet 13y ago
        I'm just wondering if your username is a reference to Virek from Count Zero.
- epc 13y ago
  Do you need the degree to learn the technical details about how to write in English properly? No. Do you need the degree to learn a small sampling of the breadth of English literature to draw on for examples, metaphors, similes, tropes and what-not to use in written communications? Probably not, if you're quite well-read. Do you need the degree to learn how to craft an argument and the differences among presenting it as an essay, a dialogue, a monologue, or poetry? Probably not, especially if you've got the Philosophy degree. But, if your goal is to communicate effectively, with a wide audience, it doesn't hurt. And it does not necessarily prevent one from excelling in I/T.
- Yhippa 13y ago
  This is something you build up to over a long period of time, not in one or two classes or even cramming it into four years.
gruseom 13y ago
It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has lasting value and none of it touches the heart of why a student would want to devote themselves to things like literature, philosophy, or art history. So over the same time period that these fields have been losing social and intellectual status, they've also been becoming less valuable. They're not going to disappear, and maybe it's a good thing if they become de-institutionalized for a century or two. I admit to being bothered by it, though. By the time I went to university it was already no longer possible to get what I would call a real education. Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely.
- abraininavat 13y ago
  Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.
  - newbie12 13y ago
    From Wikipedia: "philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; ‘the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine’.[1] A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and æsthetic values.[2]"
  - jmduke 13y ago
    If we define 'purely technical training' as that which eschews any education that doesn't specifically further one's career or technical abilities, I think an accusation of anti-intellectualism is apt. That being said, 'Philistine' is a pretty broad term that means like fifty different things, and its one of the words where saying it or writing it out loud always provokes the same response as pronouncing 'mature' with a hard t. (For what it's worth, I do think there's an echo chamber of STEM 'superiority', absolutely present on HN but more so on Reddit and Slashdot.)
JulianMorrison 13y ago
Education is what has declined. The humanities merely show it more, because they aren't particularly useful for the non-education function of university, namely, serving as a hoop which when jumped permits your resume to survive the first and most impersonal culling.
- gruseom 13y ago
  I agree. Education means bringing out that which is within. Training means to pull something along. The one has no particular end state in view, the other is about ensuring specific behaviors or, if you want to be cynical, producing followers. What we call education is really training. The question people typically ask a student about what he/she is studying: "What are you going to do with that?" is more meaningful than it seems.
- bane 13y ago
  And it's interesting because when I look back at my career, the things that really boosted my position, gave me career flexibility and got me into some very well paying jobs were all skills I learned in the humanities. But I must admit, what made me effective once I was in those positions was what I learned in my technical and science education. I've bounced back and forth from highly technical positions and non-technical positions. Humanities education taught me how to do more than just close out bug reports as a developer, but to see and anticipate the goals the software I was making had. That kind of education helped me see outside of my cube and drive many projects forward and deliver a better piece of software in the end beyond just "accepted because it works as described in the requirements document". In many ways, leading an orchestra with 150 performers in it, synchronized like clockwork, is not much different than leading a team of software developers. You take a complex problem, a score, you break it down into manageable chunks, different groups go off to work on their chunks and you slowly and painstakingly assemble those pieces until you hold a performance/release your software. But technical education allowed me to see how complex systems work, how to think about them and how to optimize them when I've worked in "softer" fields. I found I could often apply a complex and deep rational thinking to non-technical subjects by simply applying the same kind of thinking process to a problem that you'd have to apply to say, writing code to handle a complex data structure on a constrained system. Science training allowed me to weigh evidence, make hypotheses and rationally test and evaluate them...and to deal with high levels of uncertainty, things that my non-technical peers often struggled with. I'm of the opinion that education should be highly well-rounded, without excuses. Technical fields should expose people to great survey's of humanities, and humanities students should spend time studying at least the kinds of theoretical logic technical people need to get around.
lkrubner 13y ago
Paul Krugman recently had a blog post that touched upon a somewhat more general trend: the decline of "human capital" as it was, for some decades, associated with a broadly liberal education: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-capital/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-... "Nancy Folbre suggests that the golden age of human capital – roughly speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities – is already behind us. She may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both."
greenyoda 13y ago
"What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature." I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science. Also, if English dies as an academic discipline, it may very well be due to the lack of people who are able to teach it. As tenured professors retire and are replaced with poorly paid adjunct faculty who need to work part-time at multiple colleges to scrape together a meager living, the number of people who enroll in graduate programs in the humanities will probably decline.
- dorian-graph 13y ago
  I would say that those gifts aren't determined by the content (For you, CS, for others, business or whatever) as they're underlying gifts someone either has naturally and 'easily' or for others still it takes more learning and practice to acquire them. I studied design and now software engineering and I too would say I've acquired these gifts—to an extent—but also not only from university did I learn these but from my parents (We've always had a lot of books and my parents are happy readers) and situational circumstances. :) In that last sentence I was thinking that these things are hopefully taught not only at university but elsewhere and earlier too.
- gammarator 13y ago
  I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science. We all think that; it's a cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect One of the benefits of writing classes is the chance to improve in response to third-party feedback. Our arguments are rarely as tight nor our prose as clear as they seem to us.
  - Crake 13y ago
    The difference between compsci and english is that if your prose is not clear in the latter, you'll still get an A (or even get an A because of the lack of clarity), whereas your code will not work in the former if it's muddled to the point of obscurity and non-functionality.
kenko 13y ago
I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this. Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this: """ You know, I've been trying for many years now to get people to understand that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp -- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to 3.2 percent today.) But today I came across this other table -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp -- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees were awarded in the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the purposes of the NCES, "humanities" includes "degrees in Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature/letters; Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities; Multi/interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing arts." That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And "liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities" has increased sixfold. This makes up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages. """
krakensden 13y ago
> No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance. This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic bullshit that hurts people. It doesn't really matter if Johnny Middle Class believes it, his parents can probably help him muddle along somehow. Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants. I personally know at least a dozen people like that. I didn't make that mistake- but it was more by whim than anything else. The worst, saddest part of all of this, is how trope heavy and unoriginal it is. This is the world's second oldest complaint, right after "the youth are lazy and disrespectful."
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Surely the oldest complaint is that life's too brutal for romance. But why bother living, without meaning, without romance?
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    meaning == romance ??
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      That's a good question. If giving meaning to our experience is an act of creation, then perhaps this is romantic originality. But honestly, I didn't really think about it, I just thought "romantic" and that's what came out.
- sk5t 13y ago
  Are you arguing that there exists a class of people smart enough to gain admission into and pay for college, yet too simpleminded to assess the hazy job prospects based around a degree in English, psychology, art history, and the like? As far as I know, every major world culture produces writers, poets, sculptors, and musicians, and in no case is an education in those fields a guaranteed ticket to economic prosperity.
tzs 13y ago
The English major has been declining for at least a decade, due to the offshoring of coveted jobs for English majors such as writing poetry. [1] [1] http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html
kvee 13y ago
I agree. But it's ironic that the author never argues her case with clear writing. She asserts that "clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature" is extremely extremely valuable. She asserts this as a fundamental "truth." She probably doesn't even realize she needs to explain why because it actually is considered a "truth" among English majors. That's too bad. Obviously it's not considered a "truth" by the people she wants to convince. And they'll think it's just some stereotypical English major bullshit.
- bbxiao1 13y ago
  I think the decision to focus on writing was very specific. She is trying to convince people that studying the humanities can/does create a very real skill, an argument that drives a lot of STEM advocates. Personally, I see the value of humanities as how we (a society) got here and why. I think it's important, but I don't think I will have the opportunity to use this knowledge. I do not know all the author's thoughts, but I would guess that she was writing to what would generate the most appeal, not necessarily her exact thoughts.
  - kvee 13y ago
    She never makes a clear, logical case for writing. But forget about writing in particular. She never makes a clear case for the humanities at all. She just says they're really really important.
    - abraininavat 13y ago
      There should be a comma there: "really, really"
the_watcher 13y ago
As long as the people making the case for studying the humanities make it as unconvincing as the author, there will continue to be pressure towards STEM education. "I can't explain it or give a quantifiable reason, but I know that it is important" is simply unacceptable as a defense of the humanities (I majored in Political Science, and all of the standard critiques of humanities education were true of my experience).
jmduke 13y ago
I'll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly taught college English classes. Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs. They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and exams but the soul of the class is in the daily lecture; everyone comes in with X, Y, and Z read and you discuss it, growing and pruning theories and interpretations of literature as one would an oddly looking tree. A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between -- and knows how to help their students figure out everything themselves, with just enough help along the way. A good English course only needs a semester to teach you how to make a point, argue it, research it, defend it against a multitude of competing and contradicting points, and ultimately handle the reality that the point has been made many times before by people much smarter than you. (This experience is magical, and something that really can't happen in a room with more than forty people, let alone a web app with hundreds.) You develop along the way a finely honed level of communication (I had a fellow CS grad once suggest to me that 100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar, and it made me inappropriately angry); you learn how to approach questions with no answer and conversations with no real goal, how to talk with peers, mentors, and people who died hundreds of years ago. You learn a tremendous amount about yourself and others through the lens of literature, honed tightly by a great professor and a greater book, because the way you approach any experience is of course colored by everything about you. I switched out of the English department my sophomore year to pursue Computer Science, but British Literature II was the most valuable class I've ever taken.
- casual_slacker 13y ago
  A big problem lies in secondary school. There's very little exposure to formal argument, and heavy emphasis fitting ideas into a rigid paragraph structure.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    I think that's a good point -- humanities classes at the high school level in general (at least in my experience) were focused on retaining information and spitting it out in a proper format. I remember reading the Iliad for AP English and being quizzed on the name of Achilles' horse.
auctiontheory 13y ago
I'm picking up mixed messages from this article. On the one hand, the author describes the (theoretical) value of an excellent humanities education, and regrets the decline in the number of English majors. So far so okay. But on the other hand, she says that today's English majors are confused thinkers and pompous writers, and are being poorly taught. Well, in that case, what's the big loss? Let them major in a STEM field, so they might learn to think, and might also one day repay their loans. Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician.
lemmsjid 13y ago
I'm one of those English majors who pops up in interesting places (in this case, software engineering). After more than a decade in the field, I continue feeling that my degree was excellent preparation for writing code. Allow me some bullet points: * The typical English major is drilled in taking an impenetrable text and constructing an interpretive narrative (an essay). Much of the major involves writing essay after essay and having it critiqued by professors. The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives. With that understanding can come depression or the knowledge that there is never a single interpretation, and that you are looking at one facet of an ineffable infinite. If you are not overcome by dread, this skill comes in handy when it comes to interpreting business requirements. * A well trained English major is the first to point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct -- that it is but one of several paradigmatic interpretations, and is, furthermore, culturally situated. Once again, this either brings nihilistic paralysis or a 'skillful means'-type approach where you tend to respect and incorporate other peoples' viewpoints. A piece of programming is ultimately the synthesis of many viewpoints, and the skillful developer must understand that they are channeling the viewpoints of all the project stakeholders when they put pen to paper. * The close reading of poetry, especially poetry across multiple cultures and viewpoints, is excellent preparation for reading and appreciating other peoples' code--the most lacking skill in the industry today. You adopt the same mindset as a reader of poetry--first and foremost, trying to understand the situation of the author. Secondly, examining and critiquing your own visceral response -- are you irritated because the code is stupid, or is it perhaps written in a way that is consistent with an approach you do not yet understand? Thirdly, understanding that you are reading highly structured text -- what is the discipline behind the programming language you're encountering? How do its keywords and cadences lend themselves towards certain modes of expression and functionality? * In a more theoretically oriented English degree, there is much focus on language as a construct -- as the lens through which you view the world. This is incredibly true in software development, where the narrative of the code can be so oblique to the narrative on the server (for example, the way in which most modern languages behave implicitly through inheritence, and the way in which structural code can only begin to point at the interaction between threads, processes, and servers). * As an English major, I understand that I am coming from my own experiences, and I believe that the understandings I mentioned above can be gotten in any field of study. I do feel that my English major was valuable in particular because of the emphasis on the critique of the student's writing. Over the course of several years, my fundamental assumptions about anything and everything were repeatedly and effectively critiqued by my professors.
patio11 13y ago
The first paragraph would be improved by the economic reality that dare not speak its name: adjunct. Most people who pursue the PhD in English will fail to join the one profession which actually needs English PhDs (training future English PhDs) and instead, if they want to continue putting to use the last 7+ years of their life dedicated to mastering the reification of privilege and construction of the other as demonstrated by 18th century American advertising, end up as later-day itinerant minstrels. The career has little to recommend it by the standards of Harvard undergrads: poor material conditions ($3,000 for teaching a course, typically no benefits), little impact, no stability, and (perhaps most cutting of all) the social slight of being a second class citizen in academia and constantly forced, in ways large and small, to acknowledge that fact. English PhDs should come with a disclaimer: "90% of you will be unemployable. Your professor who says that you are special and such a good writer that you deserve to give this a go is lying to you. You are not a particularly good writer. You have just internalized the art of flattering English PhDs, which is unfortunate, because they expect to get that done for free and have more than enough takers. Many people who are as talented as you are unemployed or underemployed, and their only opportunity to appreciate Foucault and Kafka is when they're applying for welfare benefits." English undergrad is almost worse. Even by the standards of the humanities, which chiefly exist to certify that certain students managed to be mostly literate by senior year of high school, it tries to beat any love of the language out of you. By twist of fate and changing departmental policy, my sister (3 years my junior and a genuinely talented writer) and I ended up in the same "freshman" composition class. I phoned it in and got As and A+s, she slaved away on every essay and squeaked out a B-. She hadn't learned the bemused sneer yet. ("The author believes that the poor would better themselves through honest labor. One imagines an elf in Santa's workshop, quite appropriate since the benevolent employer is a myth but the unwavering sweatshop labor in the service of fulfilling the bourgeoises' consumerist desires is very real." <-- "OMG so nails it!!") After you've mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer, English class is your oyster. My sister refused to be cynical, grappled with the texts and worked out some genuinely beautiful prose, and barely passed. She figured it out in later years, graduated, and is currently deeply in debt after receiving a master's in an unrelated field after finding out, unsurprisingly, that a major in English makes you virtually unemployable. (One of many deep cuts along the way: she ended up working for our alma mater in a position which was, frankly, secretarial work, and was told, when she attempted to move into a permanent position, that secretaries at our alma mater should have graduate degrees because it would reflect poorly on the institution if they had just graduated in English.)
1123581321 13y ago
The necessity of studying one's own language is the problem. Most of what is read in English should have been read before college begins. And what's left? There is no language to master as there is with a French or Classics major, save some specialty work in old/middle English. The interesting linguistics are covered by that field. Education majors cover the pedagogical aspects just fine. So, the only thing that can be left is remedial reading or inventing new fields of study, and the invented fields aren't rewarding ends or means financially or intellectually.
- Crake 13y ago
  I read more books before I started college than most of my liberal arts college graduated friends have read in their entire lives. Some of them still haven't read Orwell.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Though even though I am a dyslexic I recall in my classical studies class I was the only one who read all of Thucydides as well as several extra plays by Euripides and Xenophon "the march up country"
littlemerman 13y ago
Don't overestimate the importance of your undergrad major. The value of your degree is based on the caliber of the institution from which you received it. As a history major myself I can tell you firsthand that a humanities degree does not make one unemployable.
nickthemagicman 13y ago
Steinbeck, Wells, Shaw,Twain College dropouts.
petegrif 13y ago
To my eye there is a major problem with the piece. Studying English Literature is not just learning how to write. Not is it the only way to learn how to write. One might, for example, argue that philosophy is a superior training in how to construct a coherent argument. It is supposedly also learning how to read. And IMHO this has been profoundly corrupted by the poisonous influence of a series of 'schools' informed by half digested Continental philosophers. Such philosophers are muddy enough for other philosophers and associated wannabes, but such obscurantism has been a horrific influence on the humanities. Reading through the filter of one or other of these corrupting lenses diminishes pleasure in the the text. No wonder people don't enjoy reading any more.
philco 13y ago
Deep down, I just knew I'd be blown away by both the thoughtfulness and prose in this thread. I was right. Thank you fellow HN'ers!
beloch 13y ago
I did an English minor while doing my undergraduate physics degree. It's a good thing I took the "heavy" course on literary theory last, because it utterly demoralized me. The sheer volume of books in the library devoted to literary criticism is astounding. It outweighs the entire canon of classics by at least two orders of magnitude, and it's almost all self-aggrandizing gibberish. If you could somehow distill all the original and clear ideas in these books down there wouldn't be enough material to fill a pamphlet! Perhaps I was just unlucky in my choice of books and perhaps I had a bad prof, but after that course I couldn't look at someone doing graduate studies in English and not marvel at their tolerance for bullshit. The most important lesson in writing is that "nobody wants to waste one second more than they have to reading your drivel, so get to the point". I learned this writing physics papers. I had several English profs who probably still haven't learned this lesson.
- Crake 13y ago
  The problem is that if they didn't fill it with self-aggrandizing gibberish, people would easily understand what they mean, and then go: wait, didn't so-and-so write about this already? Science still has legitimate frontiers. English, in many instances, does not.
Tichy 13y ago
Apparently an English Major enables you to fill an entire page without providing any arguments at all. That's definitely a useful skill.
- Crake 13y ago
  Haha, this. Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article.
virtualwhys 13y ago
English major to a master's in psychology to self-trained programmer, see the pattern? I was interested in all three, but programming was the only one that grabbed me in a wow, I really want to dive into this world, kind of way.
tmsh 13y ago
The article gets it completely wrong. One studies writing as an English major the way one studies programming as a computer science major. That is, the best way to do it is to inspire via other subjects that will enliven the entire career. I'm a highly skilled software engineer who was an English and Classics major at at top liberal arts college. The author of the article seems to be an authority, but he is not. Most professors of literature that I respect would look down on his attempt to generalize about the whole field based on a narrow non-fiction / writing practioner-esque approach. The reason you study English is to study literature which is the most important concentration of knowledge, distilled, evolved and selected as to what is important in the past several centuries. There is figuratively nothing actually more important (if there were, someone would've written a f-ing story). Science, by comparison, is young. The study of literature is a celebration of what is important in life. And how to live life. And how to find what is important to you in terms of each second that you live on this planet, Steve Jobs / death at your back philosophically-speaking (those are all English majory ideas -- Marvell in that case). But back to my original point. One studies computer science to understand the philosophy of how computers might be designed and used (see the Abelson SICP lectures or whatever), not to learn how to implement some Java standard interface. Though that is a little part of the practice that one has to do. Same thing with writing. I took zero writing courses, but wrote over a hundred essays on other writers and it was one of the best preparations for any field -- law, science, software engineering (in my case). Also the proper way to study literature -- ignoring all the postmodernist and cultural theory baggage -- is to study words closely and this has a long, rigorous history that again rivals any other analytical tradition. Has English studies lost its way? Sure, it always does because it's such a ridiculously large undertaking. Are more targeted philologies and close readings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading ) important? Sure. But just because the typical English major isn't as employable without other skills, doesn't mean the field itself is a bad one. But I think people get upset about it because it is such a tricky field to make a career in and can burn you if you think it is. But one doesn't set out to become an astronaut by taking astronaut classes. You have to have another broader drive. Among those who value intelligence, however, the study of literature (f- writing -- great writing has no place in the university except as a place to study it, if you ask me -- it's not primarily designed to teach writing in the world because academia does not exist primarily in the world -- it's designed to teach understanding of past writing which is precisely 'what we know', as Eliot would say, etc.). Anyway, as much as it pains me to give any credence to the idiots there: http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20fellows.html http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20f... They know enough to know that English is equal to many other pursuits of knowledge. Will it evolve to a more targeted literary analysis? Maybe. But there is nothing more important than the study of great literature. If this upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved, basically.
frozenport 13y ago
Besides a decline in overall literacy, which from personal impression is not a requirement for a English degree, I wonder if we can say this trend reflects an the accessibility of a college education. Perhaps, 30 years ago Yale boys could afford to get an English degree because they were guaranteed cushy jobs at Goldman-Sachs where their dad and granddad were partners. Now some kid programming in what once was an Indonesian island took their job.
Tycho 13y ago
Any attempt to justify time spent in pursuit of an English Lit degree inevitably sounds smug/condescending. You have to say general things like it teaches you how to write and think and appreciate the breadth of human experience - but then you are implying that everybody else must be lacking in those areas, which sounds terrible.
mathattack 13y ago
Is it possible that the decline also has to do with the decline in quality of humanities teaching? My undergrad writing "teacher" was a terrible grad student, intent on pushing a social agenda on the class. I certainly wasn't going to take any more than I had to. My "intensive writing" teacher has a very extreme political agenda attached to a geography class. I sucked it up, but vowed never to venture into his department either. I don't think it's pure practicality that's holding English back. Many CEOs are English and History majors. It's the quality of the teaching.
HockeyPlayer 13y ago
Writing well is one of the only ways to scale your impact beyond face-to-face, but you don't have to be writing about literature. Pomona taught me to write, even though I was a computer science major.

99 points by jonmumm 13y ago

gms 13y ago

Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? Seems like one or two classes would do.

Kylekramer 13y ago
I like to imagine a bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." Of course you don't need to take an English major to write properly. But that is rarely the goal of taking an English major. Very few majors are actually about the mastery of one skill.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > I like to imagine a bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." Just such claims are made in the "You need to have a degree" / "degrees are worthless" debates held hereabouts on a bi-monthly basis.
- krakensden 13y ago
  One or two classes would do, for the vast majority of tasks people accomplish with code. Lots of the more `advanced' topics aren't really that hard to learn on your own. Besides, when was the last time you looked at the curriculum for a CS or CSE major? There are some code courses, but also lots and lots of of writing, math, and physics.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." I didn't know this Hacker News was literature based. Interesting. Where is the non-bizarro one?
  - sk5t 13y ago
    No, it's the alternate universe HN that would be literature-based. This one is loosely oriented around topics such as general interest, startup-financing, and social/political dealings, with the fans of each occasionally arguing that the others don't belong.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      You appear to have missed my joke. This clearly is a HN that largely believes that CS degrees are unnecessary.
- SilasX 13y ago
  That would be the normal world, not the bizarro one. Most people here don't even have CS degrees, but picked up the relevant material as a hobby or on the job. And furthermore, would recognize that such real-world experience is much more important for what they do than what you learn in an artificial academic environment.
foobarbazqux 13y ago
> Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? It's not clear to me that majors are things that are studied, especially English ones.
- fibbery 13y ago
  I don't follow you. To complete a major you take a certain number of courses in a subject. Or are you suggesting that English majors don't learn anything?
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    If a major is a program of study, then to study a major is to study a program of study. It's possible, of course, but I don't think that's what most majors do. And English ones especially would see the subtle language implications here. (As you can see we're both already abusing the term: majors are also those that enroll in a particular program of study, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to study them.) It just seemed ironic that a question about the validity of an English major was perhaps incorrect in its use of English, that's all. Not a big deal. Not even sure if I'm right, I've just never heard "to study a major" before.
    - abraininavat 13y ago
      Thanks for illuminating the conversation by demonstrating pedantry of the type so often heard from English majors. You've done so to cleverly illustrate part of the reason the major is on its way to irrelevance, no doubt.
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
        It seems like you're having a bad day, so I've given you an upvote.
      - pjbrunet 13y ago
        I'm just wondering if your username is a reference to Virek from Count Zero.
epc 13y ago
Do you need the degree to learn the technical details about how to write in English properly? No. Do you need the degree to learn a small sampling of the breadth of English literature to draw on for examples, metaphors, similes, tropes and what-not to use in written communications? Probably not, if you're quite well-read. Do you need the degree to learn how to craft an argument and the differences among presenting it as an essay, a dialogue, a monologue, or poetry? Probably not, especially if you've got the Philosophy degree. But, if your goal is to communicate effectively, with a wide audience, it doesn't hurt. And it does not necessarily prevent one from excelling in I/T.
Yhippa 13y ago
This is something you build up to over a long period of time, not in one or two classes or even cramming it into four years.

gruseom 13y ago

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has lasting value and none of it touches the heart of why a student would want to devote themselves to things like literature, philosophy, or art history. So over the same time period that these fields have been losing social and intellectual status, they've also been becoming less valuable. They're not going to disappear, and maybe it's a good thing if they become de-institutionalized for a century or two. I admit to being bothered by it, though. By the time I went to university it was already no longer possible to get what I would call a real education. Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely.

abraininavat 13y ago
Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.
- newbie12 13y ago
  From Wikipedia: "philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; ‘the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine’.[1] A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and æsthetic values.[2]"
- jmduke 13y ago
  If we define 'purely technical training' as that which eschews any education that doesn't specifically further one's career or technical abilities, I think an accusation of anti-intellectualism is apt. That being said, 'Philistine' is a pretty broad term that means like fifty different things, and its one of the words where saying it or writing it out loud always provokes the same response as pronouncing 'mature' with a hard t. (For what it's worth, I do think there's an echo chamber of STEM 'superiority', absolutely present on HN but more so on Reddit and Slashdot.)

JulianMorrison 13y ago

Education is what has declined. The humanities merely show it more, because they aren't particularly useful for the non-education function of university, namely, serving as a hoop which when jumped permits your resume to survive the first and most impersonal culling.

gruseom 13y ago
I agree. Education means bringing out that which is within. Training means to pull something along. The one has no particular end state in view, the other is about ensuring specific behaviors or, if you want to be cynical, producing followers. What we call education is really training. The question people typically ask a student about what he/she is studying: "What are you going to do with that?" is more meaningful than it seems.
bane 13y ago
And it's interesting because when I look back at my career, the things that really boosted my position, gave me career flexibility and got me into some very well paying jobs were all skills I learned in the humanities. But I must admit, what made me effective once I was in those positions was what I learned in my technical and science education. I've bounced back and forth from highly technical positions and non-technical positions. Humanities education taught me how to do more than just close out bug reports as a developer, but to see and anticipate the goals the software I was making had. That kind of education helped me see outside of my cube and drive many projects forward and deliver a better piece of software in the end beyond just "accepted because it works as described in the requirements document". In many ways, leading an orchestra with 150 performers in it, synchronized like clockwork, is not much different than leading a team of software developers. You take a complex problem, a score, you break it down into manageable chunks, different groups go off to work on their chunks and you slowly and painstakingly assemble those pieces until you hold a performance/release your software. But technical education allowed me to see how complex systems work, how to think about them and how to optimize them when I've worked in "softer" fields. I found I could often apply a complex and deep rational thinking to non-technical subjects by simply applying the same kind of thinking process to a problem that you'd have to apply to say, writing code to handle a complex data structure on a constrained system. Science training allowed me to weigh evidence, make hypotheses and rationally test and evaluate them...and to deal with high levels of uncertainty, things that my non-technical peers often struggled with. I'm of the opinion that education should be highly well-rounded, without excuses. Technical fields should expose people to great survey's of humanities, and humanities students should spend time studying at least the kinds of theoretical logic technical people need to get around.

lkrubner 13y ago

Paul Krugman recently had a blog post that touched upon a somewhat more general trend: the decline of "human capital" as it was, for some decades, associated with a broadly liberal education: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-capital/?_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-... "Nancy Folbre suggests that the golden age of human capital – roughly speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities – is already behind us. She may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both."

greenyoda 13y ago

"What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature." I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science. Also, if English dies as an academic discipline, it may very well be due to the lack of people who are able to teach it. As tenured professors retire and are replaced with poorly paid adjunct faculty who need to work part-time at multiple colleges to scrape together a meager living, the number of people who enroll in graduate programs in the humanities will probably decline.

dorian-graph 13y ago
I would say that those gifts aren't determined by the content (For you, CS, for others, business or whatever) as they're underlying gifts someone either has naturally and 'easily' or for others still it takes more learning and practice to acquire them. I studied design and now software engineering and I too would say I've acquired these gifts—to an extent—but also not only from university did I learn these but from my parents (We've always had a lot of books and my parents are happy readers) and situational circumstances. :) In that last sentence I was thinking that these things are hopefully taught not only at university but elsewhere and earlier too.
gammarator 13y ago
I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science. We all think that; it's a cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect One of the benefits of writing classes is the chance to improve in response to third-party feedback. Our arguments are rarely as tight nor our prose as clear as they seem to us.
- Crake 13y ago
  The difference between compsci and english is that if your prose is not clear in the latter, you'll still get an A (or even get an A because of the lack of clarity), whereas your code will not work in the former if it's muddled to the point of obscurity and non-functionality.

kenko 13y ago

I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this. Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this: """ You know, I've been trying for many years now to get people to understand that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp -- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to 3.2 percent today.) But today I came across this other table -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp -- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees were awarded in the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the purposes of the NCES, "humanities" includes "degrees in Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature/letters; Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities; Multi/interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing arts." That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And "liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities" has increased sixfold. This makes up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages. """

krakensden 13y ago

> No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance. This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic bullshit that hurts people. It doesn't really matter if Johnny Middle Class believes it, his parents can probably help him muddle along somehow. Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants. I personally know at least a dozen people like that. I didn't make that mistake- but it was more by whim than anything else. The worst, saddest part of all of this, is how trope heavy and unoriginal it is. This is the world's second oldest complaint, right after "the youth are lazy and disrespectful."

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Surely the oldest complaint is that life's too brutal for romance. But why bother living, without meaning, without romance?
- abraininavat 13y ago
  meaning == romance ??
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    That's a good question. If giving meaning to our experience is an act of creation, then perhaps this is romantic originality. But honestly, I didn't really think about it, I just thought "romantic" and that's what came out.
sk5t 13y ago
Are you arguing that there exists a class of people smart enough to gain admission into and pay for college, yet too simpleminded to assess the hazy job prospects based around a degree in English, psychology, art history, and the like? As far as I know, every major world culture produces writers, poets, sculptors, and musicians, and in no case is an education in those fields a guaranteed ticket to economic prosperity.

tzs 13y ago

The English major has been declining for at least a decade, due to the offshoring of coveted jobs for English majors such as writing poetry. [1] [1] http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html

kvee 13y ago

I agree. But it's ironic that the author never argues her case with clear writing. She asserts that "clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature" is extremely extremely valuable. She asserts this as a fundamental "truth." She probably doesn't even realize she needs to explain why because it actually is considered a "truth" among English majors. That's too bad. Obviously it's not considered a "truth" by the people she wants to convince. And they'll think it's just some stereotypical English major bullshit.

bbxiao1 13y ago
I think the decision to focus on writing was very specific. She is trying to convince people that studying the humanities can/does create a very real skill, an argument that drives a lot of STEM advocates. Personally, I see the value of humanities as how we (a society) got here and why. I think it's important, but I don't think I will have the opportunity to use this knowledge. I do not know all the author's thoughts, but I would guess that she was writing to what would generate the most appeal, not necessarily her exact thoughts.
- kvee 13y ago
  She never makes a clear, logical case for writing. But forget about writing in particular. She never makes a clear case for the humanities at all. She just says they're really really important.
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    There should be a comma there: "really, really"

the_watcher 13y ago

As long as the people making the case for studying the humanities make it as unconvincing as the author, there will continue to be pressure towards STEM education. "I can't explain it or give a quantifiable reason, but I know that it is important" is simply unacceptable as a defense of the humanities (I majored in Political Science, and all of the standard critiques of humanities education were true of my experience).

jmduke 13y ago

I'll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly taught college English classes. Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs. They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and exams but the soul of the class is in the daily lecture; everyone comes in with X, Y, and Z read and you discuss it, growing and pruning theories and interpretations of literature as one would an oddly looking tree. A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between -- and knows how to help their students figure out everything themselves, with just enough help along the way. A good English course only needs a semester to teach you how to make a point, argue it, research it, defend it against a multitude of competing and contradicting points, and ultimately handle the reality that the point has been made many times before by people much smarter than you. (This experience is magical, and something that really can't happen in a room with more than forty people, let alone a web app with hundreds.) You develop along the way a finely honed level of communication (I had a fellow CS grad once suggest to me that 100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar, and it made me inappropriately angry); you learn how to approach questions with no answer and conversations with no real goal, how to talk with peers, mentors, and people who died hundreds of years ago. You learn a tremendous amount about yourself and others through the lens of literature, honed tightly by a great professor and a greater book, because the way you approach any experience is of course colored by everything about you. I switched out of the English department my sophomore year to pursue Computer Science, but British Literature II was the most valuable class I've ever taken.

casual_slacker 13y ago
A big problem lies in secondary school. There's very little exposure to formal argument, and heavy emphasis fitting ideas into a rigid paragraph structure.
- jmduke 13y ago
  I think that's a good point -- humanities classes at the high school level in general (at least in my experience) were focused on retaining information and spitting it out in a proper format. I remember reading the Iliad for AP English and being quizzed on the name of Achilles' horse.

auctiontheory 13y ago

I'm picking up mixed messages from this article. On the one hand, the author describes the (theoretical) value of an excellent humanities education, and regrets the decline in the number of English majors. So far so okay. But on the other hand, she says that today's English majors are confused thinkers and pompous writers, and are being poorly taught. Well, in that case, what's the big loss? Let them major in a STEM field, so they might learn to think, and might also one day repay their loans. Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician.

lemmsjid 13y ago

I'm one of those English majors who pops up in interesting places (in this case, software engineering). After more than a decade in the field, I continue feeling that my degree was excellent preparation for writing code. Allow me some bullet points: * The typical English major is drilled in taking an impenetrable text and constructing an interpretive narrative (an essay). Much of the major involves writing essay after essay and having it critiqued by professors. The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives. With that understanding can come depression or the knowledge that there is never a single interpretation, and that you are looking at one facet of an ineffable infinite. If you are not overcome by dread, this skill comes in handy when it comes to interpreting business requirements. * A well trained English major is the first to point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct -- that it is but one of several paradigmatic interpretations, and is, furthermore, culturally situated. Once again, this either brings nihilistic paralysis or a 'skillful means'-type approach where you tend to respect and incorporate other peoples' viewpoints. A piece of programming is ultimately the synthesis of many viewpoints, and the skillful developer must understand that they are channeling the viewpoints of all the project stakeholders when they put pen to paper. * The close reading of poetry, especially poetry across multiple cultures and viewpoints, is excellent preparation for reading and appreciating other peoples' code--the most lacking skill in the industry today. You adopt the same mindset as a reader of poetry--first and foremost, trying to understand the situation of the author. Secondly, examining and critiquing your own visceral response -- are you irritated because the code is stupid, or is it perhaps written in a way that is consistent with an approach you do not yet understand? Thirdly, understanding that you are reading highly structured text -- what is the discipline behind the programming language you're encountering? How do its keywords and cadences lend themselves towards certain modes of expression and functionality? * In a more theoretically oriented English degree, there is much focus on language as a construct -- as the lens through which you view the world. This is incredibly true in software development, where the narrative of the code can be so oblique to the narrative on the server (for example, the way in which most modern languages behave implicitly through inheritence, and the way in which structural code can only begin to point at the interaction between threads, processes, and servers). * As an English major, I understand that I am coming from my own experiences, and I believe that the understandings I mentioned above can be gotten in any field of study. I do feel that my English major was valuable in particular because of the emphasis on the critique of the student's writing. Over the course of several years, my fundamental assumptions about anything and everything were repeatedly and effectively critiqued by my professors.

patio11 13y ago

The first paragraph would be improved by the economic reality that dare not speak its name: adjunct. Most people who pursue the PhD in English will fail to join the one profession which actually needs English PhDs (training future English PhDs) and instead, if they want to continue putting to use the last 7+ years of their life dedicated to mastering the reification of privilege and construction of the other as demonstrated by 18th century American advertising, end up as later-day itinerant minstrels. The career has little to recommend it by the standards of Harvard undergrads: poor material conditions ($3,000 for teaching a course, typically no benefits), little impact, no stability, and (perhaps most cutting of all) the social slight of being a second class citizen in academia and constantly forced, in ways large and small, to acknowledge that fact. English PhDs should come with a disclaimer: "90% of you will be unemployable. Your professor who says that you are special and such a good writer that you deserve to give this a go is lying to you. You are not a particularly good writer. You have just internalized the art of flattering English PhDs, which is unfortunate, because they expect to get that done for free and have more than enough takers. Many people who are as talented as you are unemployed or underemployed, and their only opportunity to appreciate Foucault and Kafka is when they're applying for welfare benefits." English undergrad is almost worse. Even by the standards of the humanities, which chiefly exist to certify that certain students managed to be mostly literate by senior year of high school, it tries to beat any love of the language out of you. By twist of fate and changing departmental policy, my sister (3 years my junior and a genuinely talented writer) and I ended up in the same "freshman" composition class. I phoned it in and got As and A+s, she slaved away on every essay and squeaked out a B-. She hadn't learned the bemused sneer yet. ("The author believes that the poor would better themselves through honest labor. One imagines an elf in Santa's workshop, quite appropriate since the benevolent employer is a myth but the unwavering sweatshop labor in the service of fulfilling the bourgeoises' consumerist desires is very real." <-- "OMG so nails it!!") After you've mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer, English class is your oyster. My sister refused to be cynical, grappled with the texts and worked out some genuinely beautiful prose, and barely passed. She figured it out in later years, graduated, and is currently deeply in debt after receiving a master's in an unrelated field after finding out, unsurprisingly, that a major in English makes you virtually unemployable. (One of many deep cuts along the way: she ended up working for our alma mater in a position which was, frankly, secretarial work, and was told, when she attempted to move into a permanent position, that secretaries at our alma mater should have graduate degrees because it would reflect poorly on the institution if they had just graduated in English.)

1123581321 13y ago

The necessity of studying one's own language is the problem. Most of what is read in English should have been read before college begins. And what's left? There is no language to master as there is with a French or Classics major, save some specialty work in old/middle English. The interesting linguistics are covered by that field. Education majors cover the pedagogical aspects just fine. So, the only thing that can be left is remedial reading or inventing new fields of study, and the invented fields aren't rewarding ends or means financially or intellectually.

Crake 13y ago
I read more books before I started college than most of my liberal arts college graduated friends have read in their entire lives. Some of them still haven't read Orwell.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Though even though I am a dyslexic I recall in my classical studies class I was the only one who read all of Thucydides as well as several extra plays by Euripides and Xenophon "the march up country"

littlemerman 13y ago

Don't overestimate the importance of your undergrad major. The value of your degree is based on the caliber of the institution from which you received it. As a history major myself I can tell you firsthand that a humanities degree does not make one unemployable.

nickthemagicman 13y ago

Steinbeck, Wells, Shaw,Twain College dropouts.

petegrif 13y ago

To my eye there is a major problem with the piece. Studying English Literature is not just learning how to write. Not is it the only way to learn how to write. One might, for example, argue that philosophy is a superior training in how to construct a coherent argument. It is supposedly also learning how to read. And IMHO this has been profoundly corrupted by the poisonous influence of a series of 'schools' informed by half digested Continental philosophers. Such philosophers are muddy enough for other philosophers and associated wannabes, but such obscurantism has been a horrific influence on the humanities. Reading through the filter of one or other of these corrupting lenses diminishes pleasure in the the text. No wonder people don't enjoy reading any more.

philco 13y ago

Deep down, I just knew I'd be blown away by both the thoughtfulness and prose in this thread. I was right. Thank you fellow HN'ers!

beloch 13y ago

I did an English minor while doing my undergraduate physics degree. It's a good thing I took the "heavy" course on literary theory last, because it utterly demoralized me. The sheer volume of books in the library devoted to literary criticism is astounding. It outweighs the entire canon of classics by at least two orders of magnitude, and it's almost all self-aggrandizing gibberish. If you could somehow distill all the original and clear ideas in these books down there wouldn't be enough material to fill a pamphlet! Perhaps I was just unlucky in my choice of books and perhaps I had a bad prof, but after that course I couldn't look at someone doing graduate studies in English and not marvel at their tolerance for bullshit. The most important lesson in writing is that "nobody wants to waste one second more than they have to reading your drivel, so get to the point". I learned this writing physics papers. I had several English profs who probably still haven't learned this lesson.

Crake 13y ago
The problem is that if they didn't fill it with self-aggrandizing gibberish, people would easily understand what they mean, and then go: wait, didn't so-and-so write about this already? Science still has legitimate frontiers. English, in many instances, does not.

Tichy 13y ago

Apparently an English Major enables you to fill an entire page without providing any arguments at all. That's definitely a useful skill.

Crake 13y ago
Haha, this. Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article.

virtualwhys 13y ago

English major to a master's in psychology to self-trained programmer, see the pattern? I was interested in all three, but programming was the only one that grabbed me in a wow, I really want to dive into this world, kind of way.

tmsh 13y ago

The article gets it completely wrong. One studies writing as an English major the way one studies programming as a computer science major. That is, the best way to do it is to inspire via other subjects that will enliven the entire career. I'm a highly skilled software engineer who was an English and Classics major at at top liberal arts college. The author of the article seems to be an authority, but he is not. Most professors of literature that I respect would look down on his attempt to generalize about the whole field based on a narrow non-fiction / writing practioner-esque approach. The reason you study English is to study literature which is the most important concentration of knowledge, distilled, evolved and selected as to what is important in the past several centuries. There is figuratively nothing actually more important (if there were, someone would've written a f-ing story). Science, by comparison, is young. The study of literature is a celebration of what is important in life. And how to live life. And how to find what is important to you in terms of each second that you live on this planet, Steve Jobs / death at your back philosophically-speaking (those are all English majory ideas -- Marvell in that case). But back to my original point. One studies computer science to understand the philosophy of how computers might be designed and used (see the Abelson SICP lectures or whatever), not to learn how to implement some Java standard interface. Though that is a little part of the practice that one has to do. Same thing with writing. I took zero writing courses, but wrote over a hundred essays on other writers and it was one of the best preparations for any field -- law, science, software engineering (in my case). Also the proper way to study literature -- ignoring all the postmodernist and cultural theory baggage -- is to study words closely and this has a long, rigorous history that again rivals any other analytical tradition. Has English studies lost its way? Sure, it always does because it's such a ridiculously large undertaking. Are more targeted philologies and close readings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading ) important? Sure. But just because the typical English major isn't as employable without other skills, doesn't mean the field itself is a bad one. But I think people get upset about it because it is such a tricky field to make a career in and can burn you if you think it is. But one doesn't set out to become an astronaut by taking astronaut classes. You have to have another broader drive. Among those who value intelligence, however, the study of literature (f- writing -- great writing has no place in the university except as a place to study it, if you ask me -- it's not primarily designed to teach writing in the world because academia does not exist primarily in the world -- it's designed to teach understanding of past writing which is precisely 'what we know', as Eliot would say, etc.). Anyway, as much as it pains me to give any credence to the idiots there: http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20fellows.html http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20f... They know enough to know that English is equal to many other pursuits of knowledge. Will it evolve to a more targeted literary analysis? Maybe. But there is nothing more important than the study of great literature. If this upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved, basically.

frozenport 13y ago

Besides a decline in overall literacy, which from personal impression is not a requirement for a English degree, I wonder if we can say this trend reflects an the accessibility of a college education. Perhaps, 30 years ago Yale boys could afford to get an English degree because they were guaranteed cushy jobs at Goldman-Sachs where their dad and granddad were partners. Now some kid programming in what once was an Indonesian island took their job.

Tycho 13y ago

Any attempt to justify time spent in pursuit of an English Lit degree inevitably sounds smug/condescending. You have to say general things like it teaches you how to write and think and appreciate the breadth of human experience - but then you are implying that everybody else must be lacking in those areas, which sounds terrible.

mathattack 13y ago

Is it possible that the decline also has to do with the decline in quality of humanities teaching? My undergrad writing "teacher" was a terrible grad student, intent on pushing a social agenda on the class. I certainly wasn't going to take any more than I had to. My "intensive writing" teacher has a very extreme political agenda attached to a geography class. I sucked it up, but vowed never to venture into his department either. I don't think it's pure practicality that's holding English back. Many CEOs are English and History majors. It's the quality of the teaching.

HockeyPlayer 13y ago

Writing well is one of the only ways to scale your impact beyond face-to-face, but you don't have to be writing about literature. Pomona taught me to write, even though I was a computer science major.