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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary.

But they do respond to some kind of underlying rule or rules, which can be teased out, most of the time. That can be fun in many cases.

To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty?

The only English class I liked was journalism, where we were taught how to clearly and effectively communicate the facts known about something, and were rewarded by keeping things brief and to the point, rather than filling up pages with BS.

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Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world.

I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted?

There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;)

I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.

> language drives human interaction.

Very much so - and another reason I am all the more bitter about the waste of time that lit classes were: they also soured me to the whole thing for a long while.

That journalism class was great because, indeed, we also discussed how a story can misinform, even given the same underlying facts. I thought that was very useful and interesting. It was, like you say, about communication, its uses and misuses. The lit stuff never seemed to be about that, it was about obfuscation and the teacher's (?) interpretation of whatever.

I see. That's why I partially blame the teacher in that situation. I think a critical part of teaching is to contextualize the material in the larger picture.

I had a math teacher in high school who, when I asked why I had to learn the quadratic equation, answered with an asinine anecdote about someone asking her to recite it in a social setting. Mathematics felt similarly arbitrary to me at that point, and I was turned off to it for an unfortunately long period of time.

The thing was; it was a pretty clear pattern. I had good and bad science and math teachers, but even with the benefit of time and perspective, I don't hold most of the English ones in a very high regard, at least in terms of their teaching - many of them seemed to be perfectly kind and agreeable people.

One of the ones who was also held in fairly high regard in the school once got into 'time being relative', and trotted out, in the same sentence, something about experiments showing time being different at the poles and the equator, as well as something about time in "latin" cultures. That drove me up the wall!

That's a good point.

The most common question out of a student's mouth is "But why do we have to learn this?" And that's a pretty good question.

Unfortunately they're asking the people least likely to know. Teachers don't even know why most of these things are important. They learned them at school, and then they grew up and taught them, but they never passed through the stage of actually putting them to use in any other context.

Yeah! Lately I've read a few books on copy writing. That would have been hugely useful to study in high school; both in terms of learning to sell someone on something, which everyone needs to do sooner or later, as well as learning how other people try to sell to you.

> To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty?

This seems like a pretty common complaint. You seem to assume that literature should work like science. But the purpose of literature is not to rigorously refine a certain predictive model of the world. I don't want to claim exactly what it is, but maybe the telling of human experiences (and the analysis thereof) provides insights that help people better understand the muddier, less quantitative dimensions of the human world? And to that end, it doesn't matter at all whether a claim is based on what the author intended, as long as it provides some useful insight. (Yes, you _could_ use this to justify any claim at all about any piece of literature, and that's part of what this article is about. A lot of people may be "wrong" about what Frost intended, but it's insightful for them anyway, and that's just fine. Typically, academics expect that claims are based on evidence in the text, but that's still subjective and open to many interpretations.)

Similarly, the most effective way to communicate an idea is not always to present it logically and directly. There's the proverb: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." IME, it's almost always more effective to communicate an idea by causing the reader to come to it themselves. That's why narratives can be much more effective at communicating truths about human experiences than simply stating it outright. That's (one reason) why the story of Macbeth is more compelling than just telling someone "your obsession with power may make you miserable".

I agree entirely, but I think it would go a lot easier for everybody if literary interpretation were presented as personal, possibly-rewarding approaches to a text rather than authoritative assertion of fact.

My humanities-professor friends today are very good at taking the former approach, at least when talking with me. But the latter was definitely how literature was taught in all of the schools I went to. The green light on the dock was X. Or in another class, it was clearly Y. Or, in a third, it was X, and Y, and Z, and Ƶ and Ź and Ž and ζ, at which point the explanation seemed to be more akin to improvisational poetry about a Rorschach blot than any serious attempt at unpacking a metaphor or understanding an author. But it was still framed as authoritative analysis, which mainly made me think that the teachers were not so clear on what actual facts were.

Bingo!

In the same HS, I had an art teacher who was great. I gained an appreciation for abstract, 'modern' art, even if I didn't necessarily like everything I saw. She focused on how things made us feel, and if, for instance, they evoked images of other things. Stuff like that, which was all about suggestion and how elements in the image worked together, but without wrong answers or D's if we disagreed with her.

The problem with literary studies (as generally found in universities anyway) is that it's less about the author or the work and more about the critic. It's basically a pissing match to see who can construct the most impressive interpretation based on an arbitrary piece of literature.

I can accept that Literature is not about science as much as it is about defining the (intentional or non) meaning a literary work carries for its audience, but at university levels it certainly likes to present itself as if it were a science (rather than an art in itself) and embraces an obscene cargo cult effigy of what real science sounds like -- exactly like new age pseudo-science.

Furthermore, by presenting itself as a science, it gives undue authority to other social "sciences" that seem to get away with asserting falsifiable claims with no attempt to provide empirical evidence, which in turn transfers that false authority to political interest groups.

The world could do with a good amount less woo than it has now.

Agreed. Although I try to remember that technology isn't inherently less pissing-match oriented than, say, literary studies. I think the only advantage we have is that we work in a context where "prove it with numbers" is a stick that we can use to beat each other with. I think that happens to result in a modestly higher level of ambient truth, plus a modest disincentive to the more grandiose flights of bullshit.

Yeah, I think a lot of English teachers push on over-interpreting, which drives some set of students away.

It's unfortunate because there is actually a lot of beauty to be found in literature, and each reader is free to find his or her own.

Beyond beauty literature helps establish empathy by exposing you to the inner-thoughts of different types of people, and it inspires creativity, both of which are useful in any field.

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