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The Decline and Fall of the English Major

nytimes.com

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Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#41

Post by sk5t »

krakensden wrote: post #16

> No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance. This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic bullshit that hurts people. It doesn't really…

Are you arguing that there exists a class of people smart enough to gain admission into and pay for college, yet too simpleminded to assess the hazy job prospects based around a degree in English, psychology, art history, and the like?

As far as I know, every major world culture produces writers, poets, sculptors, and musicians, and in no case is an education in those fields a guaranteed ticket to economic prosperity.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#44

Post by bane »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #8

Education is what has declined. The humanities merely show it more, because they aren't particularly useful for the non-education function of university, namely, serving as a hoop which when jumped permits your resume to survive the first and most impersonal culling.

And it's interesting because when I look back at my career, the things that really boosted my position, gave me career flexibility and got me into some very well paying jobs were all skills I learned in the humanities.

But I must admit, what made me effective once I was in those positions was what I learned in my technical and science education.

I've bounced back and forth from highly technical positions and non-technical positions. Humanities education taught me how to do more than just close out bug reports as a developer, but to see and anticipate the goals the software I was making had. That kind of education helped me see outside of my cube and drive many projects forward and deliver a better piece of software in the end beyond just "accepted because it works as described in the requirements document". In many ways, leading an orchestra with 150 performers in it, synchronized like clockwork, is not much different than leading a team of software developers. You take a complex problem, a score, you break it down into manageable chunks, different groups go off to work on their chunks and you slowly and painstakingly assemble those pieces until you hold a performance/release your software.

But technical education allowed me to see how complex systems work, how to think about them and how to optimize them when I've worked in "softer" fields. I found I could often apply a complex and deep rational thinking to non-technical subjects by simply applying the same kind of thinking process to a problem that you'd have to apply to say, writing code to handle a complex data structure on a constrained system. Science training allowed me to weigh evidence, make hypotheses and rationally test and evaluate them...and to deal with high levels of uncertainty, things that my non-technical peers often struggled with.

I'm of the opinion that education should be highly well-rounded, without excuses. Technical fields should expose people to great survey's of humanities, and humanities students should spend time studying at least the kinds of theoretical logic technical people need to get around.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#45

Post by ajsharp »

patio11 wrote: post #35

The first paragraph would be improved by the economic reality that dare not speak its name: adjunct . Most people who pursue the PhD in English will fail to join the one profession which actually needs English PhDs (training future English PhDs) and instead, if they want to continue putting to use the last 7+ years of their life dedicated to mastering the reification of privilege and construction of the other as demo…

You make a great point about the economic realities of pursuing a degree in english, and even worse-so a graduate or PhD.

My takeaway from the piece, however, was that teaching the ability to communicate (writing), is in decline. Both universities and students have devalued the value of learning to write, as it's payoffs are not as great as other majors (though, political science and economics aren't exactly a guaranteed job upon graduation, not in this economy anyway). I see this deficiency constantly in engineering and computer science, and I have little doubt that other industries suffer the same problem.

I'm comfortable saying that most problems that we encounter in engineering are communication problems. Sure, there is the occasional really hard engineering problem (see: getprismatic.com). But most of what I and my peers encounter are not problems requiring major engineering feats, they're problems of human communication.

Thanks again for your thoughtful comment that lays out the harsh economic realities of pursuing english as a course of study. Still, we humans have much to gain in the effectiveness with which we communicate with one another.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#46

Post by gruseom »

jmduke wrote: post #26
abraininavat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.

If we define 'purely technical training' as that which eschews any education that doesn't specifically further one's career or technical abilities, I think an accusation of anti-intellectualism is apt. That being said, 'Philistine' is a pretty broad term that means like fifty different things, and its one of the words where saying it or writing it out loud always provokes the same response as pronouncing 'mature' wit…

Does it mean fifty different things, though? I'd say its definition is pretty precise.

I didn't realize that anyone still used the word, let alone that there was a category, "the kind of person who says 'philistine'". It reminds me of Louis CK's thing about people who say "People from Phoenix are called 'Phoenicians'". Not a category one would knowingly step into!

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#47

Post by abraininavat »

sk5t wrote: post #29
abraininavat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile there is a smugness that goes along with purely technical training, a certainty that its way is the only valuable way, that calls itself education but whose true name is Philistinism It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.

I'd say the parent comment is right on target, given the understanding that "Philistine" is not a synonym for "ignorant." There is no essential smugness in observing that students who know little philosophy, art, history, or discourse tend to consider them so much hogwash.

A Philistine is an anti-intellectual or a non-intellectual -- a person with a materialistic frame of mind, lacking the education, intelligence, or will to focus on ideas rather than things. To suggest that a Philistine is a person who is ignorant strictly of "philosophy, art, history, or discourse" is to ignore that, when the term came about, those subjects were a huge part of every curriculum. We've moved on since then and have expanded and re-categorized our domains of knowledge.

A technology-oriented education certainly doesn't imply any kind of Philistinism, despite the lack of nuance in your understanding of the term.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#48

Post by mdm_ »

jmduke wrote: post #23

I'll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly taught college English classes. Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs. They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and exams but…

Your definition of a good English course sounds more or less identical to a Philosophy course.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#49

Post by saraid216 »

casual_slacker wrote: post #28
jmduke wrote: post #23

I'll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly taught college English classes. Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs. They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and exams but…

A big problem lies in secondary school. There's very little exposure to formal argument, and heavy emphasis fitting ideas into a rigid paragraph structure.

IME, I was pushed into the 5-paragraph form more during primary education; in secondary school, there were no such requirements. (That might be a consequence of having been moved into AP classes; I never looked into what regular English did.) I think this was a good thing, since I was forced to learn to support my claims and look at them structurally.

The issue is that "English" is a non-subject. In early education, it's about literacy: being able to read and write at all. As you advance, it becomes about logic: being able to coherently express your substantiated view. And then, at the end, it becomes about literature: using deeper historical contexts to analyze a work deeply and interestingly.

These are each vastly different subjects, but we call them all "English". Which is silly. We have other words. People with English degrees should know that.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#50

Post by sk5t »

jlgreco wrote: post #18
Kylekramer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to imagine a bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." Of course you don't need to take an English major to write properly. But that is rarely the goal of taking an English major. Very few majors are actually about the mastery of one skill.

> bizarro literature based Hacker News where a person is saying "Do you really need a full Comp Sci major to write code? Seems like one or two classes would do." I didn't know this Hacker News was literature based. Interesting. Where is the non-bizarro one?

No, it's the alternate universe HN that would be literature-based.

This one is loosely oriented around topics such as general interest, startup-financing, and social/political dealings, with the fans of each occasionally arguing that the others don't belong.

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