The decline in English majors

Parents Forum
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<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468011530847064.html"&gt;http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468011530847064.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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What are the causes for this decline? There are
several, but at the root is the failure of
departments of English across the country to
champion, with passion, the books they teach
and to make a strong case to undergraduates
that the knowledge of those books and the
tradition in which they exist is a human good in
and of itself. What departments have done
instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away
from the notion that historical chronology is
important, and substitute for the books
themselves a scattered array of secondary
considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory,
sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing,
they have distanced themselves from the young
people interested in good books.

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<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>

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<p>Geez, I actually had to look up the meaning of the word ‘abstruse’, (e.g. ‘needlessly difficult to comprehend’). Ay yi yi, all those years using the word ‘obtuse’ for people around me… :)</p>

<p>Strictly from a grammar standpoint, it’s no secret that there’s been a degradation in correct English usage, in education & out in the real world. Blame whomever you like, but it’s apparent that HS graduates–hell, junior HIGH graduates–either aren’t getting taught English at ground-level or aren’t absorbing it if they are. </p>

<p>This may sound radical, but correct grammar & English usage should be mandatory coming out of eighth grade & there should be an English proficiency test to enter high school, period. It would do a world of good for ALL students to maybe get a leg up down the road re: employment. My 7th grade English teacher absolutely ramrodded sentence diagramming down our throats. I’ve talked to a few of my classmates 40 years down the road, and every one of us agrees that it was one of the best things to happen to us in our K-12 education.</p>

<p>The literature situation is only a little less dire. I think there are many, many good authors out there currently. BUT…I would suggest that beginning in primary school–once the majority of 1st, 2nd or 3rd graders have learned how to read and comprehend a little bit–the Junior Great Books should be required nationwide as part of the curriculum, working all the way up through the Great Books for high school students. Can’t do better than to be force-fed top-notch materiel for discussion & thought. My God, many of these Great Books titles are FREE for Kindle owners–that’s like GOLD!</p>

<p>I guarantee that if this back-to-basics approach was implemented, within half a generation you would have more intelligent, rational students entering their college years & eventually the workforce. And you wouldn’t have a decline in English majors in college because educationally there would be a real need for teaching this.</p>

<p>And the damn text messages wouldn’t be so cryptic… :)</p>

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<p>I have been surprised at how many of my kids’ teachers used improper grammar over the years. And I am not an English expert by any means, so my standards are not particularly high.</p>

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<p>OMG!! UR soooo RT!! LOL ROFL ■■■■■!! PWNed!! Uh oh…GTG…PIR…PAW…CU LTR!! TTFN!!</p>

<p>I weep for the future… :(</p>

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<p>I believe the decline in grammar stems from when there was a movement to stop teaching grammar. The thought was that kids would just pick it up. That was when there was also a significant drop in SAT verbal scores.</p>

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<p>annasdad, I find this a clearer, more focused complement to the William Deresiewicz critique you dusted off a week or two ago.</p>

<p>Nearly 40 years ago, my college humanities courses taught an approach to literature that began from a “close reading” of the text. The reader’s focus should initially be on the text itself, not the author’s mental state or historical context. A good book builds its own world. A good reader engages with that world the way an intelligent person engages with the rest of the world. You make observations. You pay attention to details that are puzzling or confusing (the use of words, quirks of character, surprising developments in the plot). You form hypotheses to account for these problems; you validate or discard them as you read. You try to engage with books (and by extension, with other human beings) on their own terms, instead of pigeon-holing them into your political, psychological, or linguistic theory. At the same time, you do make the book address your own interests, observations and questions. You build a personal perspective on that book that you can then share with other readers. </p>

<p>I’m not aware that any better approach has fully replaced close reading as a good starting point for general education in the Humanities. However, it can be surprisingly hard to apply this method in practice. Put 15 smart teenagers in a freshman seminar; sooner or later one or two of them begin to bloviate at will. If a good mentor isn’t there to shut them up, before you know it they’ll be doing it full time as college professors. </p>

<p>[New</a> Criticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism]New”>New Criticism - Wikipedia)</p>

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<p>I don’t think the decline in English majors has to do with grammer. I think that in the past many businesses hired “educated” college graduates. A person was considered educated if they were familiar with the classics and could discuss the human condition in terms of classical literature. A college graduate could assume they would find a job and work themselves up the ladder and have a successful life beginning with being an English major. A lot of that has changed. We have global competition and a huge need for technically based people. Not that grammer and English literature isn’t worth while or a wonderful major. Economics just dictates the need for a more practical major. </p>

<p>English teachers are education majors, not English majors. Maybe that should change.</p>

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<p>Grammar has nothing to do with the article or this discussion.</p>

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<p>That may or may not have been true at one time, but I don’t think it’s the case any more. Under NCLB, teachers of English must be “highly qualified,” and most states define that as having an academic major (or equivalent) or a master’s degree in the subject area, or else passing a competency exam. My D12 is considering becoming a middle school or high school math teacher, and all the programs for secondary education certification we’ve looked at require an academic major in the subject area. In some of the programs, the only way to get subject matter certified is to complete the education requirements in a fifth year, in some cases either for a second bachelor’s or a master’s; the master’s programs generally require some coursework in education subjects during the undergrad years.</p>

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<p>I understand that grammar is not germain to the WSJ article in literal terms, but I was pointing out that the lack of the TEACHING of grammar in secondary school has in its own way led to the bastardization of current literature education. I truly believe that speaking/writing English correctly & reading classics as a comprehension base are a foundation for success in the real world.</p>

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<p>At my kid’s middle school, the language arts teacher has actually sent home papers with corrections marked, and with grammatical errors in the corrections. The cultural literacy teacher is also a soccer coach who writes up game summaries, and the poor man cannot create a coherent English sentence.</p>

<p>Which is why we’re paying to send our kids elsewhere for high school.</p>

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<p>I doubt there was a decision to stop teaching grammar; look in the direction of a systemic inability to recruit and hire teachers who have the basic knowledge to teach grammar and English.</p>

<p>Most of the instruction given relies on having an instructor’s manual. Considering the quality of the publishers, that is a recipe for disaster.</p>

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<p>^ this …</p>

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<p>The drop in scores or the inability to raise the scores might be caused by a different issue. Students are able to pick up the more mechanical parts of the test, namely the vocabulary, the basic math, and the basic grammar. The biggest problems are related to the poor preparation of students to develop and use reasoning skills. </p>

<p>To be able to teach reasoning skills, one needs to possess them.</p>

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<p>I agree with geogirl1. I think students are wisening up to the labor market. Quality of education and enthusiasm aside - young people want jobs, and we’ve been inundated with messages reinforcing that liberal arts majors just don’t cut it in the modern workforce.</p>

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<p>I see three problems:

  1. Rigorous high school IB and AP English classes with a relentless focus on annotations have sucked the joy out of literature for a lot of kids;
  2. Many of those kids who still love literature get turned off by the constant focus on “isms” and the party line in college English classes, and the widespread abandonment of the Western Canon; and
  3. The longest median time to earn a PhD of any subject (9 years, I believe) combined with a very, very low chance of ever getting a full-time tenure track position at any college or university.</p>
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<p>This article says it best: [The</a> Decline of the English Department: An article by William M. Chace about how it happened and what can be done to reverse it | The American Scholar](<a href=“http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/]The”>The American Scholar: The Decline of the English Department - <a href='https://theamericanscholar.org/author/william-m-chace/'>William M. Chace</a>)</p>

<p>While traditional English depts. still exist in many places, the prospective English major is well-advised to check the focus of the English dept. at any school he/she is considering. </p>

<p>While there has been a concerted rightwing attack on academia, I can’t say that it’s entirely undeserved in the case of English depts. No other discipline has adopted such a mish-mash of pure crap as the basis for its theory.</p>

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<p>My theory is that fewer kids are studying English in college because high school English classes teach only depressing, gut-searing, soul-wrenching texts, because they are the only ones that are “serious literature,” as defined by high school English teachers (who, as has been pointed out earlier in the thread, are not English majors). The only text that my kids have read that was not tragic was <em>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>; not coincidentally, that was one of the very few non-twentieth century works. Who wants to major in English when all the literature you’ve read makes you feel sick at your stomach? Some Chaucer would do them good.</p>

<p>And you people who think that English departments are going downhill because they are teaching only
-isms are just drinking Koolaid. I majored in English and got my doctorate in English: I studied classical, medieval, Renaissance, Italian, French, Spanish, German, non-dramatic, dramatic, Enlightenment, Modern, and Postmodern literature. Plus a whole bunch of other literature from various time periods and cultures. I wrote my honors thesis (at a women’s college!) on a white male who had been dead for a very long time, and my doctoral thesis on the same guy. The “focus” at English departments is on literature, and while the lens may have panned out to include more marginalized figures, the good ones are still there.</p>

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<p>marysidney: at UCLA, the new (this year) major in English requires 1 upper division course from “literatures in English 1850-present,” and one course each in three of the following areas: 1. Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality and Gender Studies (8 courses offered this fall); 2. Imperial, Transnational and Colonial Studies (6 courses offered this fall); 3. Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Theory (16 courses offered this fall); 4. Creative Writing (5 courses offered this fall).
(It also requires one course each in English literature from three earlier periods, and 2 electives.) </p>

<p>The old major: Chaucer (1), Shakespeare (2), Milton (1), Brit Lit before 1800 (1), seminar (1), electives (5). </p>

<p>The new one seems a whole lot heavier on the “isms” to me.</p>

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<p>Not if you look at it like an English major: to start with, 4 courses in historical-period-based material (which probably embraces 1. Medieval [Chaucer, Langland, Arthurian]; 2. 16th Century Renaissance [Shakespeare, Spenser, maybe some earlier influential writers like Petrarch]; 3. 17th Century and Restoration [Milton, Donne, Restoration drama]; 4. 18th Century [Pope, Fielding, Swift, etc.]; 5. 19th Century [Dickens, Bronte, Austen, Hardy; or, if American, Thoreau, Emerson, Twain, Stowe, etc.]; 6. 20th Century. The student has the choice of 4 from some such periods; before, they had pretty much the same periods, but more electives. After that, you get one class Race, Ethnicity and Gender Studies: that might be British Women Writers (Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, to start with, maybe a few early novellists, and then Austen, Bronte, Woolfe), or perhaps Slavery in America (abolitionist writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, anti-abolitionists, slave narratives, etc.). One class Imperial, Transnational and Colonial studies: well, that’s a pretty significant grouping, including all writers from India, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the US, etc., as well as British writers like E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, even Dickens and Lord Byron. Genre Studies might be The Development of the Novel, or Drama, or Epic Poetry; Interdisciplinary Studies might be European Classics in Translation (Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Petrarch, Dante, Machiavelli, etc., etc., taught jointly by an English and Foreign Language professor); Critical Theory is just an important course for anyone trying to understand the subject in that way (but you don’t have to take a course in it if you don’t want to); and Creative Writing helps a critic understand the process from the inside out. </p>

<p>It seems to me that you have both more choices, and fewer: the classes are just re-organized, with fewer free electives and more structured choices to make sure you don’t overlook several important elements of the subject. You could still just about ignore anything written after 1850, with the exception of that one required course, and emerge with a respectable English major, if that’s what you want to do.</p>