<p>just adding what my experience has been:
It’s sometimes necessary to include historical context, for example, John Donne’s Satires make a lot more sense when you get the context that he was writing during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and was a Catholic before he converted to Protestantism. Otherwise, you just get a bunch of rhymes about sex…
I also didn’t notice my professor going on about sociology or communism, more of just laying out the background of writers so they were more easily understood. Essentially, teaching. The other courses listed in the coursebook have titles like Jane Austen, Study of Shakespeare, Writing Modern Fiction, etc. I didn’t notice any on grammar, but that could be because college students should be expected to be basically competent??? Linguistics is its own major at my college, so I can’t speak on why there’s none of that in the English department. Basically, I am not an English Major, but the English class I have taken was not what you described and neither was the professor.
As for the other issue of why a core curriculum is necessary. I feel that people need a baseline before they start specializing. Without it, they don’t fully recognize all the options they have.</p>