<p>Just as I’m sure that the typical engineering student seeks out the most challenging philosophy, literature, and foreign language courses in order to meet their breadth requirements.</p>
<p>Engineering requires a certain mindset. Good engineers come up with creative solutions to unique and difficult problems. That certainly requires high-order “thinking.” But it’s a different type of “thinking” than a philosopher engages in when considering the meaning of existence (or knowledge, or love, or beauty, or ethical dilemmas) or that an English major uses when analyzing Ulysses (to pick an extreme example) - or for that matter than a physicist uses when trying to understand or explain string theory, or a teacher uses when trying to figure out how to help a struggling student. None of those types or thinking are inherently “better” than the others, nor are the people who excel at any one of them inherently “smarter” than those whose intelligence is in a different vein. But they are different, and a healthy society needs smart people who can think in lots of different ways.</p>
<p>"Better to study film or TV if you love stories, sad to say, and the love of stories is the ONLY reason to major in English Lit. "</p>
<p>My nephew is going into film, he has been working in documentary film production, and he was an English major. Im not sure cutting film studies, or broadcasting, off from English depts is necessarily wise. Despite the specific technical stuff that must be learned.</p>
<p>I don’t know if it is wise, or not. I happen to be bereft at the loss of the culture or reading, personally. wise or not, there you have it, for most students. The market drives more of this the more expensive it gets to go to college.</p>
<p>While it is true that many students did try to find the easiest breadth courses, it is also the case that easier non-majors’ courses of the “physics for poets” type were generally not offered in the humanities and social studies subjects. Now if there were joke courses ostensibly suitable for majors offered by the humanities and social studies departments (which would attract non-majors looking for easy breadth courses, or people majoring in the subject to inflate their GPA for law school admissions), that would be a problem of insufficient rigor there. You and I likely agree that humanities and social studies courses can and should be rigorous and should require the student to think – but if insufficiently rigorous courses ostensibly for majors are widely available, wouldn’t that be a serious problem of the type discussed in this thread?</p>
<p>"We need English majors to justify English departments so the rest of us can take a few/several courses to enrich our education (only one reason for them). Substitute any major for the word “English”. The question becomes- how many does society need? Or- can the benefits of the major be had with another major for most? "</p>
<p>The overlap between the skill sets of english majors and other humanities majors, like Comp Lit, for Lang and lit, gender and ethnic studies, or even phil, history, art history, anthro, is substantial enough, that a variety of different numbers of english majors would work. And then there are all the “vocational” majors like communications, film, journalism, etc, that could be replaced by english majors. I mean the school my DD is attending has a game design major. Most actual game design IIUC is done by folks with regular Comp Sci degrees, not game design degrees. Things just dont map that simply, different areas are often close substitutes for each other, which complicates “how many of X” do we need.</p>
<p>Good posts ucbalumnus. Saved me from some writing.</p>
<p>I never heard that English et al courses got more/“most challenging” as the course number increased. More in depth, perhaps, but not building in difficulty upon concepts learned in earlier courses. I don’t see many prerequisites for most of those courses- they can be taken in any order generally and by nonmajors. The nonliberal arts fields see fit to have their students take humanities and social sciences alongside those in those majors- why do the liberal arts majors not challenge themselves with the same entry level science courses? I took the then Honors English Lit courses (now supplanted by top students having met reqs with AP lit courses in HS) but got B’s, my HS classmate who became a top college English prof hopefully wrote better papers and got As- he wasn’t in the honors math or chemistry freshman year of college like I was…</p>
<p>Brooklyn also says it- overlap is a key concept. </p>
<p>We had to read two books in our honors chemistry (two semesters)- timely works for the early 1970’s- “Silent Spring” and “The Double Helix” (later I spent some honors physical chemistry lab time in a grad lab studying DNA, necessary work before the biologists could sequence it et al) then write a short paper about the book of the semester. Plus all of the problem sets, lab reports and other reading.</p>
<p>I think math/science majors may have a better concept of literature than English majors usually do of sciences. Who is better educated? Do liberal arts majors indulge in as much science literature (written for the layman) as we science majors indulge in literature and history et al decades after college? The point being that no one field is superior to another for a college education- and science et al majors do get liberal arts in their breadth requirements.</p>
<p>“I don’t see how knowing the theme of a fiction book will ever help me in the real world.” </p>
<p>I have degrees in English, philosophy, and business. The business degree is useless. The other degrees are very helpful. Both English and philosophy train you to see beneath the surface of things, and to figure out the tangled mess (i.e., the truth) underneath. Many “educated” people don’t have a clue about seeing past the surface of things. They are the ones who think that the first suspicious person in an episode of CSI is the guilty party.</p>
<p>When I teach philosophy, I spend a lot of time getting students accustomed to looking past the surface appearance of things, which is completely against students’ grains these days. An example would be showing them a picture of ancient ruins in Italy and Greece, and asking them to explain 2 completely different ways that they could have gotten into their current configuration.</p>
<p>@ucb, I can only reflect from my experience, at one campus, and that almost half a century ago. The anthropology department (which didn’t even offer a major) was kept alive by engineers who took anthro to fulfill their social science requirement because it had the reputation as a “gut” course, and there was one history prof whose classes were always filled with engineers because he had the reputation of never flunking anybody. Just like Geology 101-102 was full of humanities majors who took it because it meant they had to take only one “real” science (the college required two years of lab science, which had to be different sciences) and the philosophy department enriched by humanities types who took Logic because it fulfilled the math requirement. (I took two years of real science, physics and chem, but wimped out and took Logic; turned out to be one of the most valuable courses I took, and what I learned has served me well for nigh on to 50 years; but I do regret never having studied calculus, even though I’ve never “needed” it for anything). The chem and bio courses, incidentally were the same for everyone - engineers, scientists, and humanities guys. There were two physics courses, one requiring calc and one not, and I can assure you that even the non-calc one was rigorous.</p>
<p>And the arguments that get repeated here, endlessly, are old news - I’ve yet to hear anything I didn’t hear in the ongoing engineer-versus-BA arguments from my fraternity days.</p>
<p>It probably won’t - but knowing how to read a serious novel will enrich your life. It won’t put more money in your pocket, but it will make your life so much more worth living.</p>
<p>I once had a very successful businessmen tell me he only hires English, History or students with similar degrees. He thought they learned to write well and analyze information. He said “I will teach them my business”. He never wanted to hire business majors. I wonder what do you learn as a business major that prepares you to walk into a business and be up in running without training?</p>
<p>“but wimped out and took Logic; turned out to be one of the most valuable courses I took, and what I learned has served me well for nigh on to 50 years;”</p>
<p>I agree–logic was by far the most valuable course I ever took.</p>