<p>The old liberal comeback, “You are closed-minded…” Like I said, it is getting old. In the real world, no one cares about gender and racial issues, they care if you can do the job. Oh, thanks for letting me know those guys are dead, I was totally unaware.</p>
<p>This op-ed has been posted before. I didn’t find it very compelling.</p>
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<p>I’m inclined to think that this has more to do with the fact that most people don’t have a command of early modern English. You should only expect this to get worse since ultimately in the future Shakespeare’s works will become completely unintelligible to English speakers.</p>
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<p>Ordinary people?! Ordinary people, to a large extent, couldn’t read or write in the 19th century. Let’s not forget that, for most of the 19th century, education was not an option for large swaths of society.</p>
<p>english departments are now just a place for people with a political agenda to secure employment and spew their silliness.</p>
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<p>Globally this may be true but it doesn’t hold true for this country. 80 percent of the population in Britain and America were literate in the mid-19th century. And their literacy was usually at a higher level than what we define as mass literacy today. Certainly the expectations for reading and written expression for “ordinary” middle-class people were higher. The soldiers’ letters from the Civil War, diaries, etc. are examples. </p>
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<p>Early modern English is not another language to have a “command” of. The real reason students cannot read is because they have very limited vocabularies and no understanding of allusions. Many of my students can’t read Dickens either; it’s just as hard to them as Shakespeare is. A large number of current college students can’t read anything fluidly, with pleasure and understanding, that’s not written on a 8th grade level. Why do you think we have this new genre, “Young Adult Fiction”?</p>
<p>If you believe the article, the study of the English language should foster clear and direct thinking and writing. I don’t think so. Look at the typical course offerings for a college or university English major. You will not see much that is geared towards clear and direct writing. Instead you will see lots of attention given to older pieces of English literature with torturous, out-of-date vocabulary, flowery language and allegorical meanings. If the author’s goals are to be considered, then the typical curriculum should be scrapped and replaced with a course or two in scientific writing.</p>
<p>I can’t really argue with people who think that there is no value to studying literature as an art form and a cultural legacy.</p>
<p>There is value in literature and art and cultural legacy. That is not the reasoning that the author used. Nor would those interests apply to more than a very small minority of students. It is also likely that such study would not result in many employment opportunities.</p>
<p>Yes, it seems that the opportunity for sustained and systematic study of arts and culture is becoming available only to the children of the well-off (although I guess it’s a reversion to earlier norms). Our colleges are transforming into trade schools selling an illusory promise of financial security to indebted kids.</p>
<p>There is a big difference between the study of Shakespeare and becoming a trade school.</p>
<p>There is also a big difference between learning about Shakespeare, the classical Greek plays, the history of the Roman empire and a myriad of other cultural studies and actually majoring in one of these areas. The author tries to make the case that a major in English will lead to clear and direct thinking and writing. That does not seem to be the case, nor does it match the sort of courses that are expected and required for an English major. If that is actually to be an important goal for an English major, then it is way past time for some serious revisions of the curriculum.</p>
<p>I don’t agree with the author that the primary purpose of the English major is to learn to write clearly. The purpose of the English major is to study literature in English (and many programs have an outside-the-major foreign language requirement in addition). Reading and writing assignments will strengthen facility with language and the ability to write for different purposes. Writing "“clearly” is only one kind of writing and a limited kind at that. Anyone who can write an intelligible and intelligent essay about Milton can dumb it down and write simple SVO syntax and monosyllabic words if required by a certain context. The opposite, not so much. </p>
<p>The author of the piece is an itinerant teacher of non-fiction creative writing, a popular field with its own set of aesthetics. “English” is a large discipline with many sub-areas. He is falling into the trap of trying to justify the English major by stressing its vocational relevance. No humanities major can be fully justified in this way, and it is a noose we are fashioning for ourselves if we rely on these pragmatic arguments. Maybe the study of the humanities was always a luxury, along will full employment and benefits, and in these lean times, that fact is becoming more nakedly true. If you value them, you will pursue them. If not, do something else.</p>
<p>All of this is such bosh. My English-major child is an intelligent, analytic, effective person who has succeeded perfectly well in myriad employment situations. She knew perfectly well that the world wasn’t going to pay her to lounge on a sofa and read poetry, and she conducted herself accordingly. She has been self-supporting since a month after her college graduation, and was paying for everything but her tuition and part of her rent before that.</p>
<p>She’s not going to be “pure” in terms of English-major statistics, because she has one employer-paid master’s degree and will have another by this summer. But she thinks her master’s programs have been jokes compared to the rigor of her undergraduate English major.</p>
<p>No college major entitles a student to a job. One way or another, students have to configure themselves to the needs of the world. And no non-professional major actually qualifies a student for any particular job. No matter what the major, students have to learn the alchemy by which a mixture of intellectual and physical effort can create value. An English major is as suited for that exercise as any other major. More suited, in some ways, than some other majors, for they study the creation of enormous value with little or no capital. The equivalent physics major may be lost without access to a supercollider.</p>
<p>I do agree with you, JHS. People who fret about useless humanities majors fail to grasp that it’s the person, not the major, who is employable (or not). We can’t all be, nor do we want to be, engineers or nurses. The “guaranteed employment” promise implicitly held out to students who major in hot field “x” is a myth. You don’t have to choose between getting a job and a life of the mind. It’s a false dichotomy.</p>
<p>Thank you, NJSue and JHS, for making your points so eloquently. It’s always a pleasure to read your posts.</p>
<p>I thank you as well NJSue and JHS. Very well said. </p>
<p>Just for the record. I do think that classic canonical literature should be taught. But there is value to non-canonical literature and it’s study does not need to be less rigorous.</p>
<p>Wow, “classic canonical literature!” That brings to mind the Harvard Classics from a century ago. It seems that in the past few decades we should have realized the world has moved on at a rapid pace. Struggling through obsolete language and references in Hamlet really does not seem very important. We are in a global economy with global politics and global concerns. Even a basic understanding of Chinese society would be way more important.</p>
<p>Knowledge has exploded in the past decades. It seems past due to give up some of the old and replace it with the new. We need to be much more diverse and broadminded in what we consider to be liberal arts.</p>
<p>Add me to the admiration society for NJSue and JHS. I appreciate the beautifully written posts as well as the thoughts they convey. </p>
<p>(My English major kid has been continuously employed since graduation in a field that uses her English major.)</p>
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<p>Compared to what? Learning some code that will be soon obsolete? </p>
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<p>I seem to remember in the not-too-distant past something called the Cultural Revolution in which people made similar arguments about the uselessness of traditional arts and literature. It didn’t work out too well.</p>
<p>Studying a culture’s art is an excellent way to understand it.</p>
<p>I don’t remember saying anything about the uselessness of arts and literature. </p>
<p>I do think it is time to move away from some of the old and on towards the new. The arts have changed. Now we have lots of supposedly well-educated people who claim to have no understanding of modern or contemporary art. When I was in college the world of art was exploding with new ideas. We were taught the old classic art. Hopefully that has changed but I have my doubts.</p>
<p>The world of science and technology has also exploded. Educators are trying to understand what to teach and how. They are trying to avoid exactly what you are saying. They do not want to teach something that will be obsolete before makes it into the textbooks.</p>
<p>Our culture and hence language is also changing at a rapid rate. So why continue with an emphasis on the old English classics? Let us not have any straw man debates. I am not saying Shakespeare is worthless. I am saying other things are worth greater attention which means less attention and time spent on the old knowledge base.</p>
<p>In any case this whole discussion seems to have started because someone tried to make the argument that an English major would be valuable in teaching students to write clearly. I think we can all agree that is not a strong argument for students majoring in English.</p>
<p>Have you read things written by college students recently? I don’t know what the causality is, but if you want to find people who can write clearly, you are going to have better luck among English majors (and other humanities majors) than among other types of students.</p>
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<p>Anyway, talk about straw men! It’s not like English Departments have been resistant to updating their curriculum! The vast majority of people who are not members of the MLA tend to believe that English Departments have gone much too far in devoting attention and time to things not included in the old knowledge base.</p>