<p>Every good English program offers classes on both “the Shakespeare/Chaucer/Milton canon” and non-white, non-male, non-Western, and occasionally non-dead writers, and often what the two types of classes have in common is something like “an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of [some portion of] our species through the medium of language.”</p>
<p>With all this discussion of the relevancy of an English/lit major, I thought I would check on the statistics. The National Center for Education Statistics provided the following. From the 70’s to recent years, the percentage of undergraduate degrees in English and English Lit decreased from about 5.4% to 3.2% of total degrees conferred. I was surprised at the small numbers. I thought there would be much higher percentages. Social Sciences/History declined from 13.5% to 10.4%. I was interested to see a substantial increase in graduates in the visual arts. Although the numbers are small, the percentage increased from 3.7% to 5.6%. </p>
<p>I cannot find any overall statistics about the popularity of Shakespeare but I was very surprised to see that there are quite a few very large Shakespeare festivals. All of them seem to be reporting record attendance in the past couple of years.</p>
<p>edad, your surprise on both scores only means that you really didn’t know what you were talking about in the first place. The Decline of the English Major is big news at Harvard and Yale, where it used to be among the largest majors, and no longer is, but in the larger, non-elite world of higher education it never loomed quite so large. Also, if I’m not mistaken, most of the change happened 20 years ago, not recently.</p>
<p>And Shakespeare – the popularity of those plays hasn’t been in question for a couple of centuries. If you looked back 100 years, you would see some major shifts in what people considered timeless classics from the past, but Shakespeare would be a constant. Not just in English-speaking countries, either. Shakespeare is ubiquitous globally in a way that few, if any, authors are. (Goethe and Hugo used to be, but not so much anymore. Homer, Virgil, Sophocles; Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov; Austen, Flaubert, Garcia Marquez maybe, and of course J.K. Rowling.)</p>
<p>Califormiaa, how would you know what’s taught in English classes? Your admitted disdain for anything not-STEM has been well established.</p>
<p>For what its worth, my DW was an English major who graduated from a top 20 university. After graduation she got a job as a librarian in the legal department of a Big 8 accounting firm. She went to a local (non-elite) school at night and picked up an MBA. Flash forward 30 years, she has been treasurer of two NYSE listed companies, managing director of a huge pension fund and is now CFO of a financial institution.</p>
<p>While the MBA program gave her the business tools she needed for the financial world, she has always credited the logic and reasoning skills she picked up as an English major for most of her success.</p>
<p>My kids are both avid readers but neither one of them enjoys English classes. And over the years I’ve asked them many times what they are doing/learning in English and I’ve never gotten much of an answer. I know it’s not grammar. I know it’s not focused on developing a great writing style (more like how-to-write-a formulaic-5-paragraph-essay). I suspect that some of the explanation for few English majors in college is that so many students have disliked English in high school. Even my 8th grader who is considering becoming a novelist is none too fond of English class. Another girl who planned to become an English professor while in middle school (this is a kid who read literary criticism for fun) was cured of that by high school English. I think there’s a real problem with English instruction.</p>
<p>My own high school English curriculum was fairly traditional and classics-oriented. We read Shakespeare, Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost, various “great books”. We read and wrote literary criticism. In four years, we never once had the opportunity to write creatively. We never once had the opportunity to write about anything we cared about. I enjoyed reading most of that great literature, but I didn’t necessarily have 10-15 typed double-spaced pages of anything to say about it afterwards, and being forced to do so anyhow was excruciatingly painful. How different it might have been if I’d been allowed to write about things that interested me.</p>
<p>I agree that poor middle and high school teaching is a problem. Someone who isn’t all that bright knows she can’t be a high school math teacher. But as long as someone can read and write well enough to get a B or better average as an Education major at the directional state Us that frequently house teaching programs, that person can probably become an English teacher. Some states require an MA in the subject, but some don’t, and in some places, I think that can be satisfied with an English Education MA, isn’t necessarily all that rigorous either. The barrier to entry just isn’t that high.</p>
<p>Before people object, I know there are plenty of fantastic high school English teachers out there. I had some, I was raised by one, and in the not all unlikely eventuality that I don’t get a stable job in academia at some point, I may well be one (well, I hope I’ll be fantastic). I bet that some of those great teachers even come from less than impressive programs with less than stellar resumes. But it is very much a mixed bag.</p>
<p>That being said, I think the criticism of teachers stifling creativity is often unfair. Creative Writing is, for all but a very few people, a hobby. It is great than many high schools and most colleges offer creative writing electives for students who want to hone the craft, or just enjoy writing creatively, but it isn’t the point of an English class, which, among other things, aims to get students to develop a formal voice and argumentative style. Of course not everyone likes it; not everyone likes algebra either ,but we still teach it. And the idea, which mathyone didn’t say directly but which I’ve heard many times before, that studying literature “spoils” enjoyment of it is as silly as saying that taking an Earth Science class spoils your enjoyment of the Grand Canyon. If you don’t like the level of analysis that some high school and most college professors engage in, then don’t major in English or become a professional literary critic, just like I didn’t major in philosophy or become a philosopher because I just don’t find that field interesting past a certain point.</p>
<p>As for the five paragraph essay, that’s a tool, not an ideal. I don’t know anyone who thinks the 5P essay is adequate for expressing complex ideas, but it is a good way of making sure that students can, at minimum, develop a cogent argument and start to develop, in a necessarily limited way, more sophisticated skills. By college, professors may expect an essay to show a more sustained sense of nuance than the one demonstrated by an otherwise one-sided paper that devotes a token paragraph to the other side. But teaching a high school kid to acknowledge the opposition, even in a somewhat mechanical way, is an early way of letting him know that a good paper is written on an issue that has two sides and acknowledges both of them.</p>
<p>“Creative Writing is, for all but a very few people, a hobby. It is great than many high schools and most colleges offer creative writing electives for students who want to hone the craft, or just enjoy writing creatively, but it isn’t the point of an English class, which, among other things, aims to get students to develop a formal voice and argumentative style.”</p>
<p>I have to disagree with this. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who reads literary criticism outside of English teachers and students. But look at how many books are published every year, and think about the huge advertising industry wanting people who can come up with that catchy phrase or memorable commercial–and then there’s TV, movies. As far as I can tell, the acting and production talent in Hollywood vastly outstrips the writing talent–or why would you say they’re digging so deeply into silly sitcoms and comic books from the 70’s for today’s movie plots? There is a lot of demand for creative writing; it is not just a hobby, and it seems to be vastly more valued and important to the average person than literary analysis. I find it quite ironic that in our school, you can write about things other people wrote at the honors level but it’s only considered regular level if you actually want to try to write some literature yourself–a far more difficult undertaking in my opinion.</p>
<p>Also, I didn’t mean to limit the discussion to creative writing. I mentioned not being allowed to write papers on things of interest. You can also develop a formal voice and argumentative style writing about what restrictions should be placed on abortions or whether polygamy should be allowed by the government. It doesn’t always have to be about imagery of light and darkness or rhyme schemes. But it always is.</p>
<p>As one of those Baby Boomers who did major in English, I never had a problem carving out a career. My ability to read and write well above the norm led to many options. I settled on a career in higher education. I had hoped one of my numerous children would embrace STEM; none did. Humanities all the way. One is now a successful author with her first book selling well (Scribner). Another is a lawyer in London, practicing with one of the top international firms in the world. A third parlayed his analytical ability into the criminal justice field. A fourth is presently a production and English major and plans to be a filmmaker. And that’s just four of them! English as a major is far from needing a eulogy.</p>
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<p>This is quite strange to me. I don’t think that’s the case anywhere I know of. In two otherwise very different schools, my children had plenty of practice writing things other than explicit literary criticism – including that non-explicit branch of literary criticism known as “creative writing”, as well as personal essays. My daughter taught high school English for several years, and I don’t think as much as half the writing assignments she gave remotely called for anything like literary criticism. I taught a 10-week high school literature class as an adjunct about a dozen years ago, and of the four writing assignments I gave, two were essentially five-paragraph essays, one was a personal response essay, and one an exercise in creative writing by committee – teams of three producing a proposal for a Gossip Girl-like high school soap opera (something that matched up with what we were reading at the time).</p>
<p>I don’t think the purpose of my English program was even to teach us how to write well. Little time was spent discussing the quality of student writing or how to improve it. No attention was paid to other types of writing. We never read anything that wasn’t classic fictional literature or poetry. No essays. No nonfiction. No Op-eds. No journalism. It was all literary criticism all the time. </p>
<p>I don’t think my daughter has ever been asked to write something creative, or a personal essay. I certainly wasn’t. Unlike me, she was allowed to write a nonfiction paper–once in 4 years.</p>
<p>Some of this comes down to whether you see HS English classes as primarily language classes or literature classes. Outside of AP Lang, which is specifically designed to focus on the former, I think that on the high school level, the balance is mostly toward the latter. That doesn’t mean you aren’t also teaching writing skills; I don’t see how a competent teacher could possibly assign numerous essays without giving some attention to the craft of writing, whether through a lot of classes set aside to discuss specific techniques, or through paper conferences, workshops, and comments. </p>
<p>HS English classes simply aren’t designed to give the kind of nuts and bolts instruction that you get in the lower grades. They may have to go back to basics if the students clearly can’t write a grammatical sentence, but there’s a reason that, in some districts, we call the subject IRLA (Integrated Reading and Language Arts) through 8th grade and English only afterward: while both are concerned with both literature and writing, the balance shifts once you hit high school.</p>
<p>HS English classes are still the ones to focus most on writing simply because the nature of the subject means that’s where students are doing most of it. Since they are also literature classes, they do so primarily by assigning papers on the books the students are reading.Writing a five paragraph, or even a five page paper on a book isn’t, however, developing skills that will be useless unless students go into academic literary criticism, it is developing skills that can be fairly widely applied, as most good writers find later in life whether or not they major in English. I suspect, on the most basic level, that the people who do well in rigorous English classes are among those most likely to also excel at writing a college essay and get high scores on the SAT writing section. It isn’t as if the skills you learn in English no longer apply if you are writing about yourself and not the Scarlet Letter, whether or not your English teacher devoted class time to writing personal essays. </p>
<p>I don’t think it is all that uncommon for high school English courses to have some non-fiction. EB White’s “Once More to the Lake,” Elie Wiesel’s Night and Thoreau’s Walden are still taught, although I think you’ll find very few high school kids who would rather read Walden than most novels. As for other types of writing, why would English class necessarily be the only place to do it? Presumably, history and science courses also give writing assignments, and have students read materials relevant to their subject. If a kid is upset that she never got to write a report on the Civil War, that’s something to take up with a history teacher.</p>
<p>I think some of this gets to the question of whether or not you think we should have classes devoted to literature, but perhaps that is a different discussion.</p>
<p>" the people who do well in rigorous English classes are among those most likely to also excel at writing a college essay and get high scores on the SAT writing section" Or maybe two out of three. My daughter is one of the top students in her English AP classes, and did very well on SAT writing. However, she struggled greatly with the college essays, and despite her very hard work for the past few months, I thought the results were pretty uneven. One of them ended up in the trash less than 2 days before the application deadline. I can only hope that the colleges will cut her a bit of slack on the writing seeing that she is applying as a math/science kid planning to major in CS.</p>
<p>Her 8th grade sister is the writer, and she writes for fun and for competitions, not for school. Even in middle school, there has been very little creative writing. In their poetry unit last year, they once had a single day’s homework (technically, that’s supposed to be limited to 30 minutes) devoted to actually writing poetry. They were supposed to write two poems. And two years ago, she once got to write a story, although even that was supposed to be in the format of a 5 paragraph essay if you can believe that (???) which left my poor daughter trying to figure out how she was supposed to incorporate a thesis statement into a story…That’s all I can think of in three years.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that high schools shouldn’t teach literature. Of course they should. But I don’t see creative writing as being such a distinct thing. In a science class, you study the theories and discoveries of scientists. You also do labs, which help you to understand some of the basic methodology and ways of thinking, and often, allow you to verify for yourself the theories you’ve studied. There’s a big difference in a math class between nodding along watching someone else solve problems and actually solving them yourself. It seems to me that studying literature without ever trying to write any yourself is like studying science with no labs or math with no problem sets. I think you’d gain a much deeper appreciation for the craft and language used by the authors once you tried it yourself.</p>