Why you shouldn't major in English?

<p>Great thread…English and Lit majors rock! Simply put…if you are not the accountant or money guy or computer cubicle guy then English is a great BA major many employers love. If you are a good writer then even in a low economy you will can find work. Technical writing is an great option too!</p>

<p>Wait…has saran wrap come up in this discussion yet? ;)</p>

<p>The only tiny bit of truth in this article is that yes, many English Departments have moved away from requiring a set sequence of courses on only a few classic authors (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Joyce, etc.) Those courses are still there in every English Department and nobody is going to prevent you from taking them. The rationale for moving away from this set sequence is that while these authors are utterly marvellous, there are many others who are also terrific, especially as English becomes a “world language.” As the canon gets larger, it becomes even more impossible than it was before to cover everything in an undergraduate degree. </p>

<p>I am an English professor and Shakespeare scholar who teaches the big Shakespeare lecture at my university, so you would think I would want strong requirements to “teach the classics.” In fact, though, I was strongly in favor of de-requiring Shakespeare for the English major here, and so was my politically and intellectually conservative senior colleague (a friend of Allen Bloom’s, actually). The problem is that there are a limited number of seats in the class, and I always had to give English majors priority because they needed the class to graduate. That meant that I had to turn away computer science or economics or philosophy majors in order to accommodate English majors that weren’t necessarily all that thrilled to be in my course. Now, English majors still have to take a certain number of medieval/Renaissance courses, and most of them choose to include Shakespeare, but the ones who don’t leave me free to accept motivated students from other majors.</p>

<p>Full disclosure: way back when in the supposed glory days of the English major, I didn’t take a Shakespeare course as an undergraduate. The guy who taught it had a lousy reputation. I took a Renaissance literature survey instead. It’s long been true that an English major can be as rigorous as you want to make it, or the sort of thing you choose as a major because you can’t think of anything else, and you already know the language.</p>

<p>Ray 192, Freud got a lot of his ideas by reading classic literature, particularly Shakespeare and Greek tragedy. Psychoanalytic theory, qua theory, originates in the late 19th/early 20th c. but some of its insights into sexuality, family dynamics, and so only codify things great writers have been thinking through for centuries–as you might expect.</p>

<p>[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>One reason that you shouldn’t major in English is that many people in the math and science fields will look down upon you for studying things that have never contributed to society. What has a book ever done compared to the dissection of the atom or the mapping of the human genome? Nothing. Reading is a hobby. It’s about ideas that are abstract and individualistic. Society would be better benefited by another engineer or scientist. </p>

<p>That’s one argument.</p>

<p>[On</a> path to riches, no sign of fluffy majors - Washington Post](<a href=“http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-05-23/business/35232063_1_college-degree-humanities-anthropology-degree]On”>http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-05-23/business/35232063_1_college-degree-humanities-anthropology-degree)</p>

<p>That’s another argument. Let me know if you’re still interested.</p>

<p>^I love the username.</p>

<p>Because the utilitarian argument REALLY works for barristers/:</p>

<p>“He dated the change in academic curricula from the 1960s when universities began to abandon the classic works of literature and instead adopt multicultural readings written by untalented, unimportant women and minorities”</p>

<p>He doesn’t sound biased at all…</p>