Imagine a world without English majors. In the last decade, the study of English in US colleges has fallen by a third. At Columbia University, the share of English majors fell from 10 per cent to 5 per cent between 2002 and 2020. According to a recent story in The New Yorker, this decline is largely a result of economic factors — which departments get funded, what students earn after graduation. Fields once wide open to English majors — teaching, academia, publishing, the arts, nonprofits, the media — have collapsed or become less desirable. Facing astronomical debt and an uncertain job market, students may find majors like communication arts and digital storytelling more pragmatic.
Another part of the story is how demanding English literature is, full of daunting passages through Middle English. Chaucer. The multivolume Norton Anthology, its thousands of wafery pages promising long hours of dense verse but also, stories that have endured for over 1,000 years.
And yet another important and dispiriting part of the story is that the study of English itself may have lost its allure, even among kids who enjoy reading. They are learning to hate the subject well before college. Both in terms of what kids are assigned and how they are instructed to read it, English class in middle and high school in the US is often a misery.
This began largely with the Common Core, instituted in 2010. While glorifying STEM, these nationwide standards, intended to develop a 21st-century workforce, also took care to de-emphasise literature. By high school, 70 per cent of assigned texts are meant to be nonfiction. Immersing children in the full arc of storytelling has largely gone out the window as novels have increasingly been replaced by short stories — or shorter yet, by “texts”.
The assumption is that kids aren’t discerning or tough enough to handle complexity or darkness, whether it’s the nastiness of Roald Dahl or the racism and sexism in 19th-century fiction, and that they can’t read within context or grasp the concept of history. But kids adopt the blinkered veil of presentism — the tendency to judge past events according to contemporary standards — only when adults show them how.
Citing the need to appeal to fickle tastes with engaging content, teachers often lowball student competence. Too often, this means young adult novels such as The Lightning Thief and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or popular fiction like The Outsiders, or on the more ambitious end, To Kill a Mockingbird — all engaging novels that kids might read on their own — in lieu of knottier works that benefit from instruction and classroom discussion. The palpable desperation to just get students to read a book doesn’t come across as the kind of enticement that makes literature soar.
When I was in high school in the 1980s, we read The Red Badge of Courage and The Scarlet Letter, with multiple forays into Shakespeare. We were assigned Faulkner, Joyce, Conrad and Henry James, authors whose work opened my mind and tested my abilities of comprehension and interpretation. At the same time, my teacher’s expectation that I could make sense of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, despite having no knowledge of Irish culture or the modernist movement, felt like a vote of confidence. By asking so little of students, schools today show how little they expect of them. In underestimating kids, the curriculum undermines them.
What teenager wouldn’t do well to witness the pain of Hester Prynne’s punishment and see her push through from her guilt and suffering to newfound strength and independence? Or to grapple with the themes of fate, adversity and the human condition explored in Faulkner’s novels? Or to know how 19th-century writers like Twain used satire to galvanise a nation against the injustice of racism? To experience how the pleasures, beauty and brilliance of great literature can shine a powerful light.
Nobody wants to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a useless college degree. But let’s return to the question of whether English majors are essentially unemployable. I would argue that English majors could be exactly the kind of employees who are prepared for a challenging and rapidly changing workforce: intellectually curious, truth-seeking, undaunted by unfamiliar ideas, able to read complex works and distill their meaning in clear prose.
Outside specialised professions like engineering, medicine and software design, most areas of academic study have little bearing on paid jobs in the real world anyway. Students who’ve read a fair share of English literature might offer some interesting reasons as to why.
NYTNS
