Who ruined the humanities in college?

Parents Forum
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<p>What is your take on the Journal's take?</p>

<p>Who</a> Ruined the Humanities? - WSJ.com</p>

<p>"You've probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline.</p>

<p>But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).</p>

<p>The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, "King Lear" or D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career—the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.
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<p>I must say I agree. I enjoyed reading the classics for fun, and with a group, discussing stuff out loud. But I so much hated having to write soulless essays about Homer and Shakespeare that I felt were just regurgitation of ideas that were already out there. Don't get me wrong, it's paramount to know the classics, and apply them to the real world, but when the class course sucks the life out of it, it has no meaning to the students.</p>

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<p>Interestingly, there was just an article in the SF Chronicle this past Sunday about the upsurge in hiring of English majors by businesses. Apparently they’ve finally figured out that English majors are really good at critical reading and writing, which can come in handy in the business world, not just academia.</p>

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<p>I noticed that too. And yet the comments on the WSJ article despise English majors for “schmoozing” into those positions.</p>