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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

#21

Post by foobarbazqux »

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…

Surely the oldest complaint is that life's too brutal for romance. But why bother living, without meaning, without romance?

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#22

Post by the_watcher »

As long as the people making the case for studying the humanities make it as unconvincing as the author, there will continue to be pressure towards STEM education. "I can't explain it or give a quantifiable reason, but I know that it is important" is simply unacceptable as a defense of the humanities (I majored in Political Science, and all of the standard critiques of humanities education were true of my experience).

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#23

Post by jmduke »

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 the soul of the class is in the daily lecture; everyone comes in with X, Y, and Z read and you discuss it, growing and pruning theories and interpretations of literature as one would an oddly looking tree. A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between -- and knows how to help their students figure out everything themselves, with just enough help along the way.

A good English course only needs a semester to teach you how to make a point, argue it, research it, defend it against a multitude of competing and contradicting points, and ultimately handle the reality that the point has been made many times before by people much smarter than you.

(This experience is magical, and something that really can't happen in a room with more than forty people, let alone a web app with hundreds.)

You develop along the way a finely honed level of communication (I had a fellow CS grad once suggest to me that 100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar, and it made me inappropriately angry); you learn how to approach questions with no answer and conversations with no real goal, how to talk with peers, mentors, and people who died hundreds of years ago. You learn a tremendous amount about yourself and others through the lens of literature, honed tightly by a great professor and a greater book, because the way you approach any experience is of course colored by everything about you.

I switched out of the English department my sophomore year to pursue Computer Science, but British Literature II was the most valuable class I've ever taken.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#24

Post by auctiontheory »

I'm picking up mixed messages from this article. On the one hand, the author describes the (theoretical) value of an excellent humanities education, and regrets the decline in the number of English majors. So far so okay. But on the other hand, she says that today's English majors are confused thinkers and pompous writers, and are being poorly taught. Well, in that case, what's the big loss? Let them major in a STEM field, so they might learn to think, and might also one day repay their loans.

Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#25

Post by newbie12 »

abraininavat wrote: post #19
gruseom wrote: post #3

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has…

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.

From Wikipedia: "philistinism describes the social attitude of anti-intellectualism that undervalues and despises art, beauty, spirituality, and intellect; ‘the manners, habits, and character, or mode of thinking of a philistine’.[1] A philistine person is the man or woman who is smugly narrow of mind and of conventional morality whose materialistic views and tastes indicate a lack of and indifference to cultural and æsthetic values.[2]"

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#26

Post by jmduke »

abraininavat wrote: post #19
gruseom wrote: post #3

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has…

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' with a hard t.

(For what it's worth, I do think there's an echo chamber of STEM 'superiority', absolutely present on HN but more so on Reddit and Slashdot.)

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#27

Post by gruseom »

abraininavat wrote: post #19
gruseom wrote: post #3

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has…

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.

There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines

Others? I'm talking about an attitude. (I even checked http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philistine to make sure I had the word right.) If you don't think that attitude dominates our age, we must move in different circles. In the world I live in, "education" and "job training" are synonyms.

It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post.

Oh dear. That's not good. Well, it's hard to see oneself accurately. I will say that my comment comes from long and hard experience ending in failure.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#28

Post by casual_slacker »

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.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#29

Post by sk5t »

abraininavat wrote: post #19
gruseom wrote: post #3

It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within. Because carrying on the traditions of arts and letters was no longer considered valuable, the disciplines rushed to gut themselves in favor of far shallower and dodgier stuff, like political ideologies ("the only things that matter are race, class, and gender") and pseudo-technical gibberish. None of that has…

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.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#30

Post by jmduke »

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.

I think that's a good point -- humanities classes at the high school level in general (at least in my experience) were focused on retaining information and spitting it out in a proper format. I remember reading the Iliad for AP English and being quizzed on the name of Achilles' horse.
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