The Decline and Fall of the English Major | Hacker News Reader

The Decline and Fall of the English Major

nytimes.com

99 pointsjonmumm156 comments

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 lasting value and none of it touches the heart of why a student would want to devote themselves to things like literature, philosophy, or art history. So over the same time period that these fields have been losing social and intellectual status, they've also been becoming less valuable.

They're not going to disappear, and maybe it's a good thing if they become de-institutionalized for a century or two. I admit to being bothered by it, though. By the time I went to university it was already no longer possible to get what I would call a real education. 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, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely.

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]"

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.)

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!

Such a category does indeed exist. It happens to intersect with the category of people who purposefully use words they think no one else uses.

I do like old words, especially when they fit a particular concept in just the right way.

But wow, your comments are really insinuating. "There's just something telling". "People who purposefully". "The lack of nuance in your understanding". I was interested in your point of view, but I'm finding this unpleasant and am going to stop now.

You seem to have a thin skin. The only of those phrases which is "insinuating" anything is the first. You've mentioned something about personal insults but have failed to point one out. Unless you're suggesting I shouldn't point out that you don't fully understand the old word you're using?

That's not an insult so shake it off and don't take it as one. You've got the term wrong. I agree that maybe we could have a great conversation about it, if only you'd address it instead of whining about the phrase "lack of nuance in your understanding." It's not exactly Don Rickles material.

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.

The idea that people were more culturally aware, more intellectual, or less materialistic at any time in our past compared to now is naive. If you don't think there were economic or social/political ambitions in the hearts of the young, wealthy men reciting Homer at Oxford a few hundred years ago, or even in those of young, wealthy Athenian boys lucky enough to attend secondary school, then I think you've succumbed to the Golden Age Fallacy (not to imply any sort of deductive or formal fallacy).

Furthermore, the idea that an engineering major is in any way less intellectual than an English major is ridiculous. And if that's not what you meant by the term "Philistine", then I suggest you pay more attention to the spirit of its definition less to the letter. A Philistine was once upon a time a person who had never studied philosophy, but this as only the case because every student once studied philosophy.

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.

No, it doesn't just mean anti-intellectual. It's specifically about culture, and has always included the inability to appreciate (or hostility toward) the values conveyed by art and literature. You don't get to change what words mean, and as someone who just accused me of unduly criticizing others, you might want to avoid personal insults for a spell.

And you don't get to close your eyes to the fact that things have changed. "Philistine" was synonymous with "ignorant of art and literature" only because every formal education was full or art and literature. Furthermore, much of what we today consider science was once a large part of the "art" of "philosophy".

As I've said in another comment, you've completely blinded yourself to the spirit of the term and taken the most literal definition. If Computer Scientists existed in Jonathan Swift's day, he most certainly would not have lumped them in with the Philistines.

Oh, and what was it that you consider a personal insult? I'm not seeing it.

My intent was not to persuade you on the meaning of "Philistine," but rather to support the idea that a large proportion of STEM students become rather self-satisfied in their fields' relative importance, while more-or-less mocking the humanities as useless fluff. I've not observed the converse to be true--at least not up until the Ph.D. levels.

FWIW, I had a highly varied college experience, working and associating with students of engineering, music, CS, psychology, and English. The STEM tracks demanded a uniformly pretty high level of effort, whereas you get out of the humanities about what you choose to put in.

*...support the idea that a large proportion of STEM students become rather self-satisfied in their fields' relative importance, while more-or-less mocking the humanities as useless fluff. I've not observed the converse to be true--at least not up until the Ph.D. levels..."

Regarding the attitudes of STEM students, you seem to take for granted that they're wrong about the relative importance of those fields. That isn't at all obvious to me.

The classes are useless fluff. The topics themselves are interesting, but at least for me, academic rigor is so lacking that I'm bored to tears. It's been suggested to me by someone who knows me that it's not easy for everyone like it is for me, and that's it's just because I'm smart that I'm bored. While this hadn't occurred to me until she suggested it, I suppose it could be partially the case, but I suspect the perceived easiness (as well as the actual relative easiness) of the average liberal arts degree does a lot to influence the type of student who chooses to pursue it.

Interestingly, a lot of the people you'd revere and read and study in an English class are people who had no formal English training whatsoever, or maybe high school level at best. It's only in recent years that colleges have managed to spread the myth that you can't have really learned something if you didn't pay $100,000 to do it. To me, it's just silly.

> While this hadn't occurred to me until she suggested it, I suppose it could be partially the case, but I suspect the perceived easiness (as well as the actual relative easiness) of the average liberal arts degree does a lot to influence the type of student who chooses to pursue it.

This is true everywhere; there is nothing insightful about this. I found C.S. courses to be rather mundane, boring (and even sometimes uglier) than pure Math courses. There were people in C.S. who were there because they couldn't cut it in Math. There were also people who did C.S. because they were fascinated by it. People have different motivations why they do something.

> It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within

This really resonated with me. I find the concept of a classical education immensely important. I originally wanted to be a music major before diverting to CS. Even during my CS studies, I took extra liberal coursework to try and "round out" my education: history courses, literature, etc.

I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus; sculpture and painting turned into talent and effort-free indecipherable and pointless enigmas that all talked about the same inconsequential nonsense; and architecture turned into collisional visages made of unlivable spaces and leaky roofs.

There seems frighteningly little of import, things that have honestly progressed and lifted up the species, that has come out of the humanities in recent decades -- at least as compared to everything post-Renaissance till the Industrial Revolution. There's highlights of course, but oh so much garbage. It's no wonder the general population is more interested in Pop Music than in what should be the modern equivalent of Bach.

There's an interesting experiment that's easy to conduct. Go to a classical art gallery and sit and watch the people, how they react to the art. Then do the same at a modern art gallery. I find that more people resonate and connect with work that's a millenia and a continent removed from them than they do with with the indecipherable "art" that was produced a month ago in the same city.

I remember touring the Vatican museum, which is setup basically as a long and winding path through Western History. There are works there dating back thousands of years and into modernity, many are the finest examples of their type. Being the Vatican there is of course a tremendous amount of devotional art through the ages. If you stop and look around, you see people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the wonders.

Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing irrelevance of it all.

Somehow high art lost its audience.

I try and visit modern galleries, hoping that something will speak to me the way other classical fine art speaks to me. On occasion I find something interesting or witty, something I can appreciate. But most of the time I end up in very tired "special showings" of 2 steel plates welded together, or an exploration of albedo, black square on black #47 or some similar nonsense.

I guess somebody gets this stuff, I don't, I find most of it vacuous and the work of borderline scam artists and flim-flam "artists". And I think most of the general public also feel that way. Sitting in a modern art installation and watching people as they view the work, there's an inevitable sadness. They've come to be enriched and to grow, to be moved and touched to the bottom of their soul, and instead they're met with the artistic equivalent of insults.

I know that there's a number of historical reasons for this, largely a reaction to the World Wars and a desire to detach from the normal vernacular of power that often gave voice to art. And I'm starting to see some new art in the last decade or so that's really interesting. But I can't help but feel that the pendulum swung too far and too fast away from relevancy for too long and we've lost generations of would be art supporters. And it'll be generations before our civilization learns a new "language" of expression that can reflect and resonate with people's spirits and capture and enrapture people en masse again.

I leave you with this: It's very hard to see something like this http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/0... (and it really looks like that in person) and then this http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3rdChurchChrist... and not feel like we've lost something in our art.

I disagree. Tourists in museums are generally bored by the classical/baroque/renaissance art section and entertained by the weird stuff in the contemporary section. If their jaws are agape it's because they are falling asleep, or because they weren't expecting the Mona Lisa to be so small.

And yet the classical/baroque/renaissance art museums are packed to the gills full of tourists who just sqeaked in after a 3 hour wait in line, while the modern art museums, while not empty, are certainly not trying to fend off the crowds.

Nothing can prepare you for the press of people even in the off-season clamoring to get into the Uffizi -- who's main claims to fame are:

1) being the main museum in Florence

2) a forgettable Michelangelo

3) one stiff da Vinci and one musky da Vinci, both forgettable.

but while there you might turn a corner and see something like this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Piero_di_...

which would be just at home in a surrealist installation at the MoMA as in the Uffizi.

But I do have to agree, the never ending pictures of punctured saints with long faces, Madonna and Child's and Crucifixes does get tiresome. At least there's always Caravaggio to make things interesting for the modern audience.

A lot of people get photo realistic art. Its obviously difficult to achieve the colors and simulacrums with the technology of the time.

On the other hand, understanding the entire sequence of western art - of Grecian art, its loss and the elevation of stark, religiously themed art during the dark ages, followed by the renaissance and onwards, makes western history and an important chunk of many modern unspoken assumptions make sense.

In other words, starting with Middle-ages art but moving onwards is an effective and memorably way to hack the meta discussion humanity has been having about itself through the ages.

The Uffizi also has The Birth of Venus and Primavera, the Allegory of Spring, both of which are immortal masterpieces. And quite a few other things....

allegorical counterexample, but here in New York my impression is that the biggest crush of tourists trying to get into a museum is the one at MoMA. This may have something to do with size; the other most popular museum is clearly the Met, which is so huge that it's rare, even in NY, to have it be truly jam packed.

Someone else already said it, but I do believe that that the biggest reason for the difference in quality between old art and new art is that old art has had the benefit of the filter of history; for the most part, the bad stuff got thrown out and good stuff survived. In geek's terms, you might say that the old stuff that remains is sturgeon's 10%, but that 90% of the new stuff is, in fact, crud.

My first impulse at this was to slam my fists on my keyboard and howl with rage.

Since that's totally unproductive and not an appropriate response to a sophisticated argument such as yours, I'll abstain.

I'd also like to acknowledge that at the end of my remarks, we're unlikely to agree fully. But I'm hoping I can demonstrate my perception of these phenomenon that you specify, my perception of your perception, and in that, why I think you're mistaken on a few fronts.

1. Your classical education failed you if you can't identify one of the most important reasons visual art has changed so much.

>I remember touring the Vatican museum... If you stop and look around, you see people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the wonders. Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing irrelevance of it all.

I'll start by pointing out that I happily do stop at these galleries. Western visual culture was essentially devoted to cultivating photo-realism for centuries. Then the camera (and its derivatives) came into prominence and set off a powerful debate, primarily academic, about what the goal of visual art and its means should be. I think this controversy is a very interesting one and I enjoy watching it-- but you have to be aware of the controversy for a lot of it to make sense. I posit that we should teach it because it's part of our culture and has been for decades.

On a more personal note, a lot of modern art is trash in the way that a lot of pre-modern art was too. But a lot of it also speaks to me, and I don't appreciate what I interpret as your weirdly simultaneously faux-populist and faux-elitist suggestion that I'm being insulted.

2. I dispute your implicit claim that high art ever had that tremendous an audience. In raw terms, it's actually larger today than it was a hundred years ago-- think about the number of people we educate today versus then.

3. I'll quote you again: >I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus...

Which philosophers are you accusing of navel gazing? Perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

And who do you consider high-music? Again, perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

I perceive you as lamenting the decline of high art culture while simultaneously lashing out at people who do try to improve it with a vaguely populist criticism not well grounded in any historical-empirical data about popular art appreciation.

Post script, you can like pop and Bach at the same time and there's precisely nothing wrong with that.

> Post script, you can like pop and Bach at the same time and there's precisely nothing wrong with that.

THIS. And let me add Bach is (was) the dance music of yesteryears (follow the 3/4). (Mozart was probably rock)

The thing with "modern music is crap" has one factor helping it, we never got to hear Bach's time crap music.

(Note: the above is my opinion based on my shallow knowledge of music)

> "Bach is (was) the dance music of yesteryears (follow the 3/4). (Mozart was probably rock)"

Not so much. Bach and Mozart were employed by quite wealthy individuals to compose and perform pieces for nobility and aristocracy. The only way the proletariat population would have heard their work would have been in a church-setting of some sort, probably performed by someone with very little skill or training.

>"we never got to hear Bach's time crap music"

More than you might imagine, actually. While folk songs were rarely written down in any sort of musical-notation there were (and doubtlessly still are) scholars who worked tirelessly at uncovering these old works as best they could and those were the real 'dance music' of the era. Songs written on the same 4-chord pattern we use this very day and age. Songs about love, loss, friends, family, etc. Typically upbeat and always set to a beat that you could sway your hips to. Instrumentation would have been based on either a piano, flute, or that century's particular flavor of stringed instrument.

It's been a good while since I studied this subject, I'll see if I can dig up a source for this info tonight.

Mostly right, actually Bach was a church music director for most of his career (though he did the Royal court thing also). The great majority of his body of work is vocal liturgical church music.

I think you deserve a more thought out response than I have time for just now. I've tried to be judicious in my original comment and not point out specific artists I prefer or take issue with.

But I'll say this, I'm specifically only talking about the direction high-art has taken that I'm finding troublesome. Pop music and its equivalents in other media I don't really have a problem with. It's the modern day equivalent of a Jig, a Gigue or a Sarabande. By definitely, it's the perfect representation of der Geist seiner Zeit. That kind of art is doing its own thing and I'm specifically not talking about it (though that would be an interesting discussion by itself).

- lest you think I'm poo pooing the entire field, here's some music I think is worthwhile for us to both enjoy, Steve Reich's later works like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLckHHc25ww and I'm coming at it as somebody who once aspired to be a professional concert violinist.

>I'll start by pointing out that I happily do stop at these galleries.

Fair; there's no sense arguing over taste. But you must admit that modern art is a lot less popular and accessible than older. (Side point: a lot of photography I see is very powerful and moving and also accessible. I would argue that photographers are the true heirs of renaissance artists and deserve more respect. But that's again a question of taste).

>I think this controversy is a very interesting one and I enjoy watching it-- but you have to be aware of the controversy for a lot of it to make sense. I posit that we should teach it because it's part of our culture and has been for decades.

That seems a bit circular, and worse, backwards. If it were truly part of our culture then people would understand and relate to it whether it was taught or not. If modern art in fact belongs to a small subculture, then it remains to be shown why we should be teaching it as opposed to, say, skateboarding (which is an expressive artform with a rich and complex culture around it - but can seem empty and meaningless to outsiders).

>On a more personal note, a lot of modern art is trash in the way that a lot of pre-modern art was too. But a lot of it also speaks to me, and I don't appreciate what I interpret as your weirdly simultaneously faux-populist and faux-elitist suggestion that I'm being insulted.

Maybe you don't get that feeling, but the GP is not unique in it. A lot of modern art and artists seem to look down on their audience; they're obtuse for its own sake, and dismiss critics as too stupid to get it. Whereas from the old masters I get a far more friendly vibe; they can be paternalistic, but there seems to be a desire to work on multiple levels, to offer something to improve even the most inexperienced or childish viewer, while providing more depth to those who want to appreciate it - but you can take as much or as little as you want.

>2. I dispute your implicit claim that high art ever had that tremendous an audience. In raw terms, it's actually larger today than it was a hundred years ago-- think about the number of people we educate today versus then.

It's interesting that you talk of "high art" because my understanding is the divide didn't really exist prior to about 1900. Composers once saw popularity as the measure of success, and would make efforts (e.g. piano arrangements) to make their work accessible to those who could not hear the "full" version. Likewise plays and even operas were popular forms, again aiming for the largest audience possible. Your point about raw numbers is true but I don't think particularly relevant.

>Which philosophers are you accusing of navel gazing? Perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

Satre is probably the greatest example, seemingly wilfully incomprehensible. The whole direction of recent philosophy - cultural relativism and postmodernism - seems not merely pointless but actively harmful, denying the obvious value of scientific truth and western civilization, and for what benefit?

>And who do you consider high-music? Again, perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

So restrict our attention to music using the classical orchestra. There are people composing popular works that I would expect to still be played many years from now - those making film and videogame soundtracks. But the establishment seems to look down on those, and indeed on anything that uses traditional harmony, tonality etc.

I think the common theme coming through here is that while older art could be difficult it never seemed wilfully so; the artist was always cooperating with the viewer, trying to raise them up. Modern art seems to see the viewer as competition, someone who must be tested to see if they're worthy. It reminds me of the bad old days of roleplaying, where DMs thought they were fighting against the players rather than telling a story with them.

I think there is a deep truth here.

Most artists are acute observers of the human condition. They distill the products of such observation into artistic truths and evolve forms to freshly present their insights.

The problem is that there is only so much an acute observer can learn about the human condition and share with us. Have we really experienced many people who have pushed the limits of such acuity materially further than did Shakespeare? I think not. It takes tools to advance beyond casual empiricism. And this is why science has indeed outstripped art as a lens with which to wonder at the world.

For a person who has recognized that his/her time is finite and who wishes to drain as much understanding of the wonder of the world as possible in this short allotment the density of insights to be gained from reading scientific journals is many times greater than that to be had by reading even the most brilliant of novelists. Once you've read Shakespeare, Tolstoy and some more of a greats (a worthy business to be sure) diminishing returns soon sets in. Look to science for brighter lights.

Most artists are acute observers of the human condition.

Seriously? Most artists? Do you mean "most famous artists", or "the most accomplished artists", or "the best artists", or something like that? Or do you mean something like "artists tend to be more acute observers of the human condition than non-artists"?

I agree with the rest of your post, so if you meant the statement as it's written I'm going to assume that you either haven't met many artists or that you've just been lucky with the ones you've met.

LOL. That bothered me too. I don't think art is limited, or should be limited, by our humanity. Just because we're physical beings, doesn't mean we're limited by the physical world. I'd argue many artists find the physical world boring, which is why they're drawn to art.

The problem is that there is only so much an acute observer can learn about the human condition and share with us.

Very good point. We'll ultimately have to ask ourselves if -- paraphrasing Borges -- art and literature can exhaust their own possibilities.

I think they can. We need to ask new questions, because the old ones have all been addressed adequately by now.

Like you, I seem to spend a lot more time reading scientific and technical material nowadays, and almost none reading novels or fiction of any kind. I'm only moderately well-read, but even so, every bit of fiction that I read seems redundant with something I've already read.

A disturbing line of thought.

Take heart: things aren't quite as bad as you suggest. While the modern art world is certainly full of horrific hacks (Damien Hirst), a good amount of modern art truly is interesting (I'm rather fond of Jackson Pollock, myself).

Perhaps more importantly, representational and realistic art has been making a significant comeback in the last decade or so. Schools still teach classical painting techniques. Many artists create fantastic new work. For example, Adrian Gottlieb is a star, with prominent commissions and tremendous respect among collectors. Here's a wonderful portrait — http://www.adriangottlieb.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/4_J... — IMO, this level of work holds up well against the old masters, and it is less than ten years old.

I would not call Hirst a hack, a hacker maybe, but not a hack. No one has managed to capture, understand and most importantly exploit the zeitgeist of the modern art movement like Hirst has. Hirst is the modern art scene personified. Looking at his works in isolation is rather missing the point. Everything from how his work is produced to how it is sold is integral to his art, the physical artifacts that come out of his factory are only a tiny part of it.

Representational art was valuable in those days, worth spending time on, because they didn't have Internet, TV, movies, photography, magazines, etc. 3D representation of objects on a 2D surface was still a new, challenging concept. Those Renaissance painters aimed to reach Joe Sixpack who was illiterate. Representational art wasn't meant to be that challenging. No surprise Average Joe still nods his head in approval: "No way my 6-year-old could do that." Most people today when they see art they think two things: "How much time did that take?" and "Could my six-year-old do that?" That's the sad reality. There's still hope for humanity but I'm just putting this into perspective for you ;-) Some of those Renaissance artists snuck in advanced shape science, carefully modulated colors, but most people could care less, besides the few artists who reached that level too. If Rubens painted Crucifixions today, they'd be dismissed as simplistic, unchallenging, old-fashioned, trivial. As far as the future of art, in my opinion it isn't so literal--it's more imaginative, not limited by the laws of physics, instead pushes the limits of comprehension. All the language we have now had to be invented at some point. The drug of the artist is that invention, to be in the creative moment of discovery. Doing something new. Knowledge keeps expanding regardless what museum goers think. Just the concept of "perspective" was challenging at some point. Today's art viewer just has different, more advanced challenges. That said, I wouldn't defend most modern/contemporary art.

I absolutely agree. I don't think a return to old forms is what's in order. But a return to art that the average Joe can look at and think "no way my 6-year-old could do that".

And that's the problem today, so much of current art is something a 6-year-old could envision. And the unfortunate reality is, if the art looks like it was made with a lack of sophistication, the message it's trying to convey must be unsophisticated as well (despite the insistent yearnings of the art establishment)...at least that's the reasoning most people will have when viewing it.

This is why you need the museum, art critic, docent and the monstrous gold frame around a humble Cezanne painting of some fruit on a table. Half of Van Gogh's work was destroyed, dismissed as trash. Van Gogh was an unsophisticated man. To avoid this fate and gain credibility, artists and writers will add superfluous flourishes. The way I see it, art often gets the "sophistication upgrade" to meet the sophisticated audience halfway. LOL.

Old art is all popular because the unpopular old art wasn't kept around. Modern art looks unpopular because it hasn't yet been filtered.

that's part of it, but there is also an increased emphasis on intent away from skill, and 'craftsmanship' has practically become a bad word. On the other hand, this unfortunate turn has made places like the American Visionary Art Museum (which celebrates "idiosyncratic skill") really interesting.

Sounds like classical art is like pop music then? Guess what would happen if people could choose between pop and "quality" (whatever that means) music? Oh right, just look at charts. Since when is the quality of art correlated with its popularity?

Plus there's probably a lot of selection bias going on here, i.e. the bad classical art has been forgotten (or lost!) whereas the same hasn't yet happened with modern art.

> 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, and I feel sad that that mentality is taking over our society completely.

I'm gonna risk it and sound very smug here, but I hear this a lot from non-technical folks and I completely disagree.

First of all, I'm yet to meet a STEM-educated person, who thinks that this "way is the only valuable way". Moreover, I'm convinced that this whole dichotomy is wrong. There are no different ways. It would be like saying that there is a way of writing on clay tablets using wooden picks vs. using paper and ballpen, and the paper-and-pen people are philistines. There's a reason we're doing the latter instead of the former - this is objectively better tech. Ditto for thinking. Maths is essentially distilled, formalized rational thinking.

Sure art and literature are valuable, we can learn a lot from them about humanity and we can experience a great deal of emotion (which is an important part of our lives). But don't for a second think you can feel the matter into subjection or dream your way to the Moon.

I know a few people who say things like "programmers think in binary code, and they fail because world is not black and white". But it is them who think black and white. The math you (are supposed to) learn on a technical training track actually gives you necessary framework to reason about uncertainty and fuzziness; I'd say programmers and engineers are better equipped to reason about the world correctly - because getting the right answers is the part of their training and jobs. The point is, technical training gives you (or is supposed to give) the precision of thinking, lack of which is - in my opinion - one of the reasons mainstream philosophy is so mostly useless pandering nowdays.

One does not have to choose either-or between arts and sciences. Just don't pretend you can reason about the world correctly without the latter, because the sciences is what humanity created to understand the world.

I have a degree in English literature and criticism. I later followed it with a degree in applied computer science. I'm glad for both, and was disappointed in both, for multiple different reasons.

I think I understand why you would accuse the humanities of being "rotten", but I'm not sure it captures my own experience of the malaise affecting college humanities departments (at least what I witnessed, with a somewhat jaundiced eye). I would say that the humanities is deeply conflicted about its purpose and relevance, and maybe even its approach and techniques. That there is little, if any, consensus on these questions. That there isn't even any agreement on whether consensus is desirable, even a surface consensus for the benefit of students. That cynicism, confusion, uncertainty and fear are rife and toxic in the minds of faculty and administration. That this is in many ways a reflection of the mind of society at large, especially our leadership, actual or effective.

On the other hand, the purpose of technical training is less contentious, and it's focus is generally not challenged much. There are questions about technique and content, and there is wide variance in teaching talent, but overall, most scientific disciplines have done a good job of building a reasonable syllabus based on foundational theory and mixed practise. We can feel confident after taking a scientific that we have acquired some amount of true knowledge and useful understanding.

But the exact opposite seems to be true of humanities, whether studied institutionally or privately. The same questions which have haunted us since the beginning of human history still haunt us today. These questions are all philosophical; the best, most honest answer to virtually all of them is, still, "We don't know." Throughout history, numerous people, including many undoubted geniuses, have suggested answers and made tremendous arguments. Today, many of those answers are still compelling, but, over time, their justifications have eroded under scrutiny. The more we look at human nature, and the more anecdotal evidence we collect, the more we fail to understand it.

That is the nature of art and letters: it is a vast and ever-growing accumulation of mostly anecdotal evidence which intelligent, talented and persuasive people throughout history have tried to use to validate their own opinions of the nature of human nature, life and existence. And most of it, no matter how beautifully presented, is all so much empty rhetoric, and completely unproven.

A programme in humanities, therefor, amounts to a lot of time and energy spent studying well-spoken (or otherwise well-illustrated), but failed attempts to provide insight into the core questions of philosophy. Many have embraced this uncertainty, but not answering a question is still a kind of answer. It never definitively proves that the question is invalid. And yet few seem willing to accept, and virtually none are satisfied with the truth: "We don't know."

As a result, the programme has degenerated into a cacophony. And yet, for the purposes of administrative coherence and the need to fulfill some sort of comprehensible structure, in order to reliably function in a standardized institutional setting, we still offer "courses" with focused areas of subject, and degrees made of such courses. Faculty members must continue to publish papers and/or creative works of their own. In all ways, schools must continue to behave as though they had some kind of coherent sense of their purpose and significance, despite a complete lack of any such belief in anyone's mind. We continue to allow these so-called specialists to decide, on society's (or at least education's) behalf what it means to study, find value, and finally "understand" these questions, or at least the techniques of, and approaches to, attempting to answer them.

So what we have is a sort of free-for-all disguised as a serious occupation, and a large body of highly paid specialists essentially run amok. No one knows what they are trying to accomplish, or what their level of success is or has been, so we just take them on their word that they are doing it, or that at least they are trying. With each passing year, the map of the territory continues to grow, but we are no better equipped to navigate through it. At least, it seems that the tools that educators and researchers might be using, from the social sciences, are not being used in ways which might help them, at least with any real scientific rigour. On the contrary, science continues to be misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by humanities faculty, to the detriment of everyone (themselves, their students, and society and culture at large).

One of the most important features of the scientific programme is that of prioritizing knowledge based on our confidence in its truth and reliability. While historians of science may continue to study the failed efforts and discredited theories of the past, we do not, as a rule, teach these to practising scientists and engineers. They represent curiosities, or negative lessons in how to study science. The humanities either cannot, or will not, follow suit. The most important fight in the history of humanities was that over the "canon", and it was a decisive loss for everyone. There is no accepted way to prioritize works. The yardstick of truth is not applicable. Beauty, subject matter, technique, form: all are matters of taste. And the simple and undeniable fact is that you cannot study taste. You can study matter and technique, and to some extent you can judge the difference between the attempt and the result, but even that has its detractors. When truth cannot be known, every opinion is valid, and no arguments are final.

Attempting to endure this nightmare of existential uncertainty is attractive to very few people. For those who enjoy art, and would like to spend their days discussing it, and especially those who like having an audience for their own opinions, for which they have a rather high regard, academia is an attractive option. No one can prove you wrong, but popularity can prove your right, at least for a time.

Interestingly, this isn't that different from software start-ups, which are, more and more, about popularity and fashion than they are about inventing new things and the transforming the world.

> 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 matter if Johnny Middle Class believes it, his parents can probably help him muddle along somehow. Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants.

I personally know at least a dozen people like that. I didn't make that mistake- but it was more by whim than anything else.

The worst, saddest part of all of this, is how trope heavy and unoriginal it is. This is the world's second oldest complaint, right after "the youth are lazy and disrespectful."

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

meaning == romance ??

That's a good question. If giving meaning to our experience is an act of creation, then perhaps this is romantic originality. But honestly, I didn't really think about it, I just thought "romantic" and that's what came out.

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.

You're assuming a lot here. A lot of intelligent people are told at a young age that college is an answer to their life aspirations. Just college. Not college and smart decisions about what to study and what habits to form and who to make friends with and what to do in the years in between. College. That's it. As a culture, we've told young people that.

That's what I was told at least. I went to liberal arts school and studied psychology and I had no idea what would be necessary to get a job after graduation. In fact I assumed since I was in college and all these smart interesting adults around me seemed to think studying psychology or English was a normal decision that I wouldn't have to worry about practical things like finding a job afterwards because I was at a good college and after a good college those sort of things fall into place. Fortunately for me I am resourceful and patient with the idea that my education taught me to think and communicate well and that practical skills are things you can acquire on your own time and hard work.

But a lot of teenagers are told college alone is an answer. And young people are naive. It is a problem with how we guide young people through their lives not a problem with them not understanding the world.

Yes. Simple-minded is an obnoxious word; brainwashed gets closer to it but implies too much a malevolent force at work.

Cold statistics are one thing, but everyone has trouble actually chewing them over when every part of your environment is telling you "all you need to do is go to college, and everything will work out fine." If you know the ins and outs of how post-college employment works, you're working from a position of stark informational privilege compared to someone who doesn't. The people who succeed as English majors are much louder than the large majority who don't, and the people selling the English majors certainly aren't telling them they have a decent chance of ending up immiserated.

If you genuinely enjoy English literature and writing, it's easy to fall into that trap. Many people here majored in CS, and that's awesome and has worked out well for them. But I would also take a gander that, going into college, those people weren't blank slates who had no love of CS and just did a mechanical calculation as to what would generate the most time-discounted income years. They had worked with computers in the past and loved it. It's very easy to overlook how much emotional or arational factors plays into your own choices while condemning those whose arational choices end up tossing them into another bin.

Obviously the choices people make aren't totally ignorant of economic factors, but they also aren't determined by them.

I am saying that there are lots and lots of well meaning authority figures who will look 17 year-olds in the eye and tell them they should just get a degree, and worry about money later.

I believe that they do this because high minded nostalgic nonsense like the linked article is published on a regular basis, every year, forever, drumming that idea home.

I have met a LOT of people who thought that their degree in English, psychology, art history, and the like was going to get them a $60,000/year job fresh out of school. Heck, even some of the artists I know expected to be able to pay off their $80,000 in student loans with their art degree.

Now they sit around their parents house whenever they're not at their part time retail job and complain about how "the economy" screwed them over.

> 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?

There is a metric fuck-ton of people who get into college and have no idea what they got into college for. That's what happens when you tell entire generations of 18-year-olds that merely having a college degree is the important part, and that they must have a college degree.

Counting them off in my head about half the people I went to highschool with (and kept in touch with) picked majors based on what interested them most, only to start panicing 3 to 4 years later and desperately throw in teaching track classes. Two unemployed english teachers, three unemployed chemistry teachers, and a woman with a BS in mathematics who is currently teaching special education 5th graders in maryland. Besides the last, the rest are mostly all still living with their parents taking substitute teaching gigs. The Chemistry/Math people got hosed by not having any plan or intention of going further than a bachelors degree.

> 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?

Being smart in one facet of life doesn't mean that you're necessarily smart in another one. And smart people can make stupid life-decisions.

The "it" in the passage you quote is not an English degree, but the skill to write well: "the ability to distribute [your] thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own."

The author is not saying everyone should major in English; she is saying that the skills of rhetoric--careful reading, clear writing, tight argumentation--are powerful and shouldn't be lost in the rush to "marketable" majors.

He[1] wrote a short piece decrying the decline of the English Major. That was the closing line. The klaxon call to action of the salesman would be gauche.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlyn_Klinkenborg

"Jorge, though, first in his family to get to college, might just take it seriously, and wind up somewhere ugly with too much debt, four years gone, and a piece of paper that nobody wants."

This exactly. This sort of lie about college--that it doesn't matter what the cost is--is perpetuated by meaningless and empty platitudes. Unlike many others of the kind, however, it has the potential to permanently destroy a young person's life. High school guidance counselors whose parents paid for their education still continue to advise kids without any parental support that they should spend as much money as possible to get the "best" education they can afford. It's cruelty of the highest form: apathy towards those from lesser circumstances than you.

I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this.

Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this:

""" You know, I've been trying for many years now to get people to understand that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp -- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to 3.2 percent today.)

But today I came across this other table -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp -- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees were awarded in the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the purposes of the NCES, "humanities" includes "degrees in Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature/letters; Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities; Multi/interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing arts." That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And "liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities" has increased sixfold. This makes up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages. """

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.

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.

I think questions like that are meant to check that you actually read the book, and with a certain amount of detail. High school students are notorious for skipping or skimming readings and/or relying on resources like Sparknotes, especially with more difficult texts like the Iliad.

(I may or may not be speaking from personal experience...)

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.

The 5-paragraph essay gets a lot of hate, much of it deserved as it gets overused, but I've found it a very helpful tool to get students to organize their thoughts. I used to help tutor East Asian ESL students and getting them to understand how to make an argument and then support it with evidence was difficult, but once they grokked how it worked, vastly improved their communications.

Were I a regular English teacher, I don't think I'd let a student coast in 5-paragraph beyond a semester.

> 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.

A very good point. We used to call "English" education by the subject you were learning "reading" "writing" "grammar" "spelling" "punctuation" "letters", "creative writing", "technical writing", "literary analysis" etc. But in some grand scheme to simplify things I guess we just use "English" now, which is frankly lame.

the 5-paragraph structure is wonderful. I used (a 4-paragraph version of) it for my MCATs in one essay and used the french equivalent (these - antithese - synthese) in another - mind you you have 30 minutes to organize and write each essay. It forces you to do exactly that, think about what your point is and put in a place where your reader will actually see it, and not drown it in a sea of words.

A scientific paper is basically that, except expanded into bigger sections. When authors take liberties with the structure it really results in incomprehensible gibberish. Even for general expository writing - I found that reading through internship essays, for example, when the essay was a ramble, I would chuck the whole application, but when the essay had clear topics and supporting information structure, I kept it.

Well, make no mistake: the 5-paragraph structure is a crutch. It's like a coloring book: all the lines are drawn for you and you fill it in. That's not a bad thing, though, because you're learning about muscle control and coloration and texture... but it's completely different from drawing your own picture.

At the point you've learned how to construct an argument and substantiate it with supporting claims, you're ready to leave it behind for longer (or shorter!), less structured forms... or to pull it back out when you feel it's appropriate.

Goodness, yes.

My academic background is a mix of humanities and third-rate engineering (history and economics, hah).

I find that even at high levels in undergrad history, there's little sense that arguments don't have to-- and usually don't!-- adhere to the 5-7 paragraph template/bullshit one's often taught in secondary school.

I used to tutor a fair bit, and weaning people off that stilted and artificial convention became one of my preoccupations.

Now that I'm done bloviating, an interesting historical analogue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay

Well, more than anything it sounds like you had a good teacher. I think the essence of this experience is possible with any material, provided the teacher is good. I mean, your description almost reads like the kind of martial arts training you see in movies. (This is not a bad thing.) But, I'll agree that it's more likely in the humanities, in a small class, with a passionate teacher. The advisor/advisee relationship in grad school seems like a great place for it, in an ideal world.

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

I completely agree. The, by far, most useful course I took in high school was English literature. Far more useful than any math or science class, despite going on to study physics and getting a degree in maths.

"100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar"

They are--which is, luckily, one of many reasons I placed out of them.

"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..."

Or they could write a book and you could read it for free at the library, or online. Why limit knowledge to people who have $50,000/year to blow on college? Not everyone is rich and upper class. Can only people from well off families become "properly" educated? I've met a lot of educated people from all walks of life, and all levels of education. To me, at least, intelligence and a drive to learn are far greater indicators of someone's likely degree of sophistication than how much their parents spent on their four year vacation to some over priced campus.

Well taught classes are a nice idea, but most people will never have access to a good teacher, much less a good classroom environment. I've had good teachers but a ruined class experiment by sufficiently unprepared or even just unintelligent classmates.

There's nothing magical about college. You can do just as well with finding informed and (likely more enthused, even) peers at a open access book club, if not the often maligned internet forums dedicated to literature.

I've seen too many english and other writing intensive liberal arts majors graduate without knowing the difference between your and you're, its and it's, to really have any respect for the degree. Oddly, my scientist friends have few problems with attention to detail and understanding basic syntax, despite not spending four years on mastering the subject. I suspect this is because they already mastered it in high school, if not earlier, much like myself.

If you have to go to college to learn, you're doing it wrong. (And these days--also very expensively.)

Or they could write a book and you could read it for free at the library, or online.

Because, as I said in my original comment, the value of good English courses lies less in the dissemination of information and more in the underlying discourse. To borrow a weak metaphor: reading a lot of criticisms and interpretations is like having someone lift the barbell while you're on the bench. Sure, you might tax your arms a little bit but you're not actually working out.

Why limit knowledge to people who have $50,000/year to blow on college? Not everyone is rich and upper class. Can only people from well off families become "properly" educated? ... To me, at least, intelligence and a drive to learn are far greater indicators of someone's likely degree of sophistication than how much their parents spent on their four year vacation to some over priced campus.

This is completely irrelevant to the point I made, and it appears you're just trying to rail against the college system as a whole. Which is cool, I guess.

I don't want to disparage your anecdotal evidence, but I -- and imagine many, many others -- have had the exact opposite experience. The average literacy and communication ability of a STEM graduate is far below that of a humanities grad. Also, the implication of this passage is that anyone who goes into a liberal arts major is less intelligent than anyone who goes into a science. I'd like you to qualify that because it sounds condescending as hell.

I agree. But it's ironic that the author never argues her case with clear writing.

She asserts that "clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature" is extremely extremely valuable. She asserts this as a fundamental "truth."

She probably doesn't even realize she needs to explain why because it actually is considered a "truth" among English majors.

That's too bad. Obviously it's not considered a "truth" by the people she wants to convince. And they'll think it's just some stereotypical English major bullshit.

I think the decision to focus on writing was very specific. She is trying to convince people that studying the humanities can/does create a very real skill, an argument that drives a lot of STEM advocates.

Personally, I see the value of humanities as how we (a society) got here and why. I think it's important, but I don't think I will have the opportunity to use this knowledge. I do not know all the author's thoughts, but I would guess that she was writing to what would generate the most appeal, not necessarily her exact thoughts.

She never makes a clear, logical case for writing.

But forget about writing in particular. She never makes a clear case for the humanities at all. She just says they're really really important.

There should be a comma there: "really, really"

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.

I agree. Education means bringing out that which is within. Training means to pull something along. The one has no particular end state in view, the other is about ensuring specific behaviors or, if you want to be cynical, producing followers. What we call education is really training. The question people typically ask a student about what he/she is studying: "What are you going to do with that?" is more meaningful than it seems.

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.

"What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature."

I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science.

Also, if English dies as an academic discipline, it may very well be due to the lack of people who are able to teach it. As tenured professors retire and are replaced with poorly paid adjunct faculty who need to work part-time at multiple colleges to scrape together a meager living, the number of people who enroll in graduate programs in the humanities will probably decline.

I would say that those gifts aren't determined by the content (For you, CS, for others, business or whatever) as they're underlying gifts someone either has naturally and 'easily' or for others still it takes more learning and practice to acquire them. I studied design and now software engineering and I too would say I've acquired these gifts—to an extent—but also not only from university did I learn these but from my parents (We've always had a lot of books and my parents are happy readers) and situational circumstances. :) In that last sentence I was thinking that these things are hopefully taught not only at university but elsewhere and earlier too.

I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science.

We all think that; it's a cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect

One of the benefits of writing classes is the chance to improve in response to third-party feedback. Our arguments are rarely as tight nor our prose as clear as they seem to us.

The difference between compsci and english is that if your prose is not clear in the latter, you'll still get an A (or even get an A because of the lack of clarity), whereas your code will not work in the former if it's muddled to the point of obscurity and non-functionality.

There is a difference between writing code and writing prose though. I've met many, many, many programmers who might have been good at their jobs but suck terribly at expressing their ideas during meeting or even in emails. It makes team work very tedious and time consuming.

I did an English minor while doing my undergraduate physics degree. It's a good thing I took the "heavy" course on literary theory last, because it utterly demoralized me. The sheer volume of books in the library devoted to literary criticism is astounding. It outweighs the entire canon of classics by at least two orders of magnitude, and it's almost all self-aggrandizing gibberish. If you could somehow distill all the original and clear ideas in these books down there wouldn't be enough material to fill a pamphlet! Perhaps I was just unlucky in my choice of books and perhaps I had a bad prof, but after that course I couldn't look at someone doing graduate studies in English and not marvel at their tolerance for bullshit.

The most important lesson in writing is that "nobody wants to waste one second more than they have to reading your drivel, so get to the point". I learned this writing physics papers. I had several English profs who probably still haven't learned this lesson.

The problem is that if they didn't fill it with self-aggrandizing gibberish, people would easily understand what they mean, and then go: wait, didn't so-and-so write about this already?

Science still has legitimate frontiers. English, in many instances, does not.

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).

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.

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 demonstrated by 18th century American advertising, end up as later-day itinerant minstrels. The career has little to recommend it by the standards of Harvard undergrads: poor material conditions ($3,000 for teaching a course, typically no benefits), little impact, no stability, and (perhaps most cutting of all) the social slight of being a second class citizen in academia and constantly forced, in ways large and small, to acknowledge that fact.

English PhDs should come with a disclaimer: "90% of you will be unemployable. Your professor who says that you are special and such a good writer that you deserve to give this a go is lying to you. You are not a particularly good writer. You have just internalized the art of flattering English PhDs, which is unfortunate, because they expect to get that done for free and have more than enough takers. Many people who are as talented as you are unemployed or underemployed, and their only opportunity to appreciate Foucault and Kafka is when they're applying for welfare benefits."

English undergrad is almost worse. Even by the standards of the humanities, which chiefly exist to certify that certain students managed to be mostly literate by senior year of high school, it tries to beat any love of the language out of you. By twist of fate and changing departmental policy, my sister (3 years my junior and a genuinely talented writer) and I ended up in the same "freshman" composition class. I phoned it in and got As and A+s, she slaved away on every essay and squeaked out a B-. She hadn't learned the bemused sneer yet. ("The author believes that the poor would better themselves through honest labor. One imagines an elf in Santa's workshop, quite appropriate since the benevolent employer is a myth but the unwavering sweatshop labor in the service of fulfilling the bourgeoises' consumerist desires is very real." <-- "OMG so nails it!!") After you've mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer, English class is your oyster. My sister refused to be cynical, grappled with the texts and worked out some genuinely beautiful prose, and barely passed. She figured it out in later years, graduated, and is currently deeply in debt after receiving a master's in an unrelated field after finding out, unsurprisingly, that a major in English makes you virtually unemployable. (One of many deep cuts along the way: she ended up working for our alma mater in a position which was, frankly, secretarial work, and was told, when she attempted to move into a permanent position, that secretaries at our alma mater should have graduate degrees because it would reflect poorly on the institution if they had just graduated in English.)

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.

> My takeaway from the piece, however, was that teaching the ability to communicate (writing), is in decline.

Isn't it another case of us idealizing the past? Like the "declinie of morality/society" which actually is like it always has been? I used to think that writing and reading skills are maybe really in decline, right until I saw this xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/1227/

As for today I don't know really of any social decline that really is.

That xkcd post also allows for the condition of perpetual decline. That life has become faster paced and less open to concentration on production of communications and artistic works continuously over centuries.

I think there's probably a strong case to be made for that within some strata of society.

I guess a lot of it comes down to quality of instruction. One of my most eye opening experiences as an English major was when I turned an essay about a religious text (honestly I forget which one). The essay used a writing style that intentionally aped Nietzche's "Twilight of the Idols" to eviscerate the idea of religiosity. It was the type of essay I was used to getting an A on, because I was showing off all of my pedestrian literary and rhetorical flourishes to please an already-converted audience.

I got a fail on the paper and a summons to the professor's office. He raked me over the coals for failing to do the most important thing--respect the material. After all, what was I trying to achieve? Ultimately, nothing--I was just spewing my anger at religion, in the same way that stereotypical fundamentalists spew their anger at infidels. Like a hurt animal, I was using my best offensive skill--a young adroitness with language--to make a childish swipe at something beyond my understanding.

In other words, he called me out for my empty intellectual exercises. I was hurt and broken. Then I mended myself, and I thank him forever for doing that.

Would you like fries with that?

He or she wrote a sincere and earnest comment. Please show yourself out.

Consider that maybe you missed pjbrunet's point.

Perhaps so. If pjbrunet was making a clever joke, I suppose I owe them an apology.

I dunno, I missed it too. Maybe something to do with the economic use of a personal epiphany? Either way I appreciate your response, and your openness to be wrong.

> Would you like fries with that?

This was a snide remark about education as emotional entertainment, a bourgeois pleasure if there ever was one.

Alternatively, it was about some claim that English majors are likely to be employed at fast food establishments.

Alternatively alternatively, it was about the fast food nature of the life experience gained in an English course.

Any other interpretations?

How about, you can make fun of religion while working at mcdonalds, get yelled at for it, and improve your life and outlook. From a systems analysis perspective for that one small task its a more efficient vehicle/tool than education. It is a pretty simple and straightforward lesson that doesn't need to be needlessly complicated.

I can get insights from literature... and other things. I can also DO other things. Lit as the only source of insight is inaccurate, misleading, and inefficient. Don't confuse this with the logical opposite and assume I'm saying there's no insight in lit... I love to read, especially the "good stuff". I just acknowledge there's a whole world out there.

"At the time, if anyone had asked me "what are you going to 'do' with that? what about the economics?" (and I know this, because they did), I would have said that economics aren't everything. Are they?"

While I was in art school, I can't count the number of times I heard the phrase: "Would you like fries with that?"

#2 was always something about underwater basketweaving.

I guess the humor/affirmation didn't translate. Maybe I hit "reply" too far down, took a while for the fries thing to bubble up from 19 years ago. Maybe not such a common phrase in this context as it was back then.

Haha, oh goodness. It seems an apology is actually due. Sorry, pjbrunet-- I thought your remark quite mean-spirited on the first go. But I'm delighted to know my interpretation was incorrect!

Whoever initially decided to repurpose McDonald's sales language, I passed the downvotes to them. Coincidentally, my girlfriend/classmate worked at McDonald's through college. She took no student loans. (Her father was kicked out of our school for clearing the dean's desk in response to "Poor boys like you don't belong here.") I expected to make six-figures as a digital artist (somewhere like ILM) straight out of college and the economy was thriving. Maybe that's why I blew off the basketweaving jabs. But as this thread demonstrates, maybe those were missed opportunities to discuss artistic ideals, why potential suffering would be worth it. At that point I had no idea some writers literally ate dog food to survive while working on their books or that an artist like DeKooning nearly lost his teeth from starvation. What was the real intent behind "Would you like fries with that?" I don't know. But it has a ring to it ;-)

This is one of the reasons I hate Nietzche.

But your comment already takes for granted that there's no purpose in studying literature other than a career in academia (presumably because education is only about careers to begin with). I'd say the battle for the things worth caring about here was lost long before that assumption became not-even-worth-bothering-to-make-explicit. And sure, the economics are pathetic and the profession is rife with horseshit.

The reason I studied literature for a while was that I wanted to learn what literature could teach me, because I wanted to connect with a noble tradition, and things like that. At the time, if anyone had asked me "what are you going to 'do' with that? what about the economics?" (and I know this, because they did), I would have said that economics aren't everything. Are they?

Edit: come to think of it, that battle was probably already lost when people tried to pretend that there was a viable middle-class career path in any of it to begin with. Traditionally, this stuff was produced by the leisure classes, entertainment professionals, and poor bohemians. I'm not sure the marriage with academia turned out to be a very good or a very long-lasting thing. I'm quite sure that tying this cultural tradition to any short-term notion of economic utility is pointless; might as well shoot it in the head.

I have the utmost respect for literary traditions, education as a means of self-improvement, and the intangible values of persuing mastery over a broad field of human experience.

And if English degrees had anything to do with that, I'd probably like them, too. That ship has sailed and then was burnt on distant shores, long before I was born.

(I don't think there's a whole lot of daylight between the two of us, honestly.)

Traditionally, this stuff was produced by the leisure classes

Spot-on, IMO.

I also want to learn what literature can teach me. So: I read it. It's designed for that.

Literary critics can also be very enlightening. But, by a strange coincidence, most of their work is written down, and often collected by libraries and websites. To admire their ideas is just a matter of time and coffee.

If I were inclined I could even try to write some literature, and thereby connect with the noble tradition – one which dominates the canon and is far older than university literature programs – of "learning to write by practicing reading, writing, and publishing stuff instead of by jumping through expensive hoops to get a formal degree."

It is true that economics aren't everything. But when the fifty thousand dollars in student loans comes due one begins to realize that they are something.

If getting a degree were the only way to acquire knowledge in humanities or literature then the world would be a sad place indeed.

Fortunately that's not the case.

It's easy to appreciate literature. Cheap even. And I would argue that colleges actually do more to harm the practice than to help it.

My undergrad degree in literature might not have gotten me a high-paying job out of college, but it helped me live a life that I wanted.

I had the privilege of doing my final two years of college at a school where grades weren't given out for papers in the English department.

You'd write a one-page response paper to a Shakespeare play, where you'd have to make a cogent argument/close reading and in response, you'd get 300 words from the professor engaging with your argument.

My classes wandered across Irish literature, non-fiction writing seminars, 18th century literature, modern and post-modern theory, and hyper-text literature.

I learned to engage with the classics, learned to hear the poetry in James Joyce's initially inscrutable Ulysses, and was forced to confront the problems of loving Pound's words while abhorring his politics.

I learned tech later, as I went. I probably would have made more money studying computer science or cognitive science (which was fascinating mix of technology and theory), but I don't regret at all being a liberal arts major.

The world is big, fascinating and hard to think through -- and that's not getting any easier. I owe to my liberal arts education the limited skills I have for finding beauty in a true sentence or the mismatched typography of a local business's sign.

That education has driven me to understand why I need to live in the world an open heart, to understand things that I naturally want to dismiss and to forge a life built on an ethically-driven approach to politics, literature and art.

I've got lots of arguments about how our education system works - starting way before college.

But if the new reality is that college is only good for pushing out technicians and a liberal arts education is only for suckers, then we've just added one more depressing symptom pointing to a diagnosis that there's something deeply awry in our nation's economic system and social priorities.

> But if the new reality is that college is only good for pushing out technicians and a liberal arts education is only for suckers, then we've just added one more depressing symptom pointing to a diagnosis that there's something deeply awry in our nation's economic system and social priorities.

I think the problem is more that people expect to be employable after going to college. If you are independently wealthy and are just going for laughs, sure, the lack of concrete utility in an English degree is not a problem. But I don't think that's the position of most college students. They want all those intangible benefits you discussed (live with an open heart, understand things, etc.), but they also intend to put themselves on the path to a comfortable life, and they don't find out until after graduating with an English degree and a ton of debt that they only get the intangible benefits and are on roughly the same career trajectory as they were before they went to college.

I could never understand why my classmates had such trouble with getting good grades in English classes. Most of them attended similar if not superior high schools. The Catholic school students certainly should have had a better grasp of language and composition.

In the long run, my successes were a combination of reading experience and the ability to quickly create mental outlines. I was a voracious reader as a child because that was the only world that did not judge me. At a time when my father was going through his charismatic evangelical midlife crisis and my mother sat on the opposite side tossing me over as a peace offering to keep my sisters off limits, I insulated myself with the written word. I read roughly 800 books between 2nd and 3rd grade. While I could not diagram a sentence for you and could barely remember the difference between a pronoun and an gerund, if asked to put thought to paper then I had no problems.

In retrospect, I suppose it would be interesting to see how differently students would write if they weren't clobbered over the head for simple grammar errors. I used three of tricks to help me through college writing courses. The first was simply cutting out any superfluous language unless the paper required a ridiculously high word count. The second was to avoid, as much as possible, the use of any commas, colons, or semi-colons. The third was to always scan over my paper to make sure that my sentences weren't filled with sudden changes in tense. If you crush a student on small punctuation and grammar errors, don't be surprised when you end up with students who have never been able to fully express themselves, and therefore no longer know how to do so. Grammar is the stack of guidelines we use to help convey clear meaning, but grammar is not meaning itself. Language specifications don't write literature OR code.

What bothers me nowadays is that since I have immersed myself into the culture of the internet, my ability to sit and concentrate and compose thoughtful narrative has become stunted. My messages have become shorter and more direct, and my conversations change topic quickly. I wonder how it bodes for students who have never lived in an internet-free world.

"My messages have become shorter and more direct". This is a good thing. Not everyone can or should be a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Faulkner. It seems to me the way you've written this post is not so bad. All you have to do to make it a real, long-form essay, book, or series, is to collect your thoughts, organize, and be unafraid to edit (or pay someone to edit for you).

I sometimes use online communication like a letter. I pause to collect my thoughts. I proof-read. I revise.

Two points: (1). I only do this when I have something to say (or, rather, when thoughts call me to say them). However, pretty much whenever I look into something, I find I have something to say. (2). They are typically only a paragraph or two long, even though the argument might have several parts and be carefully nuanced. That's partly because I'm striving for simplicity and clarity but it might be simply the natural length of those thoughts. However, again, the more I look into something, the more I find I have to say.

So (having written this) I think my writing quantity and length is less a measure of my ability than of how often and how deeply I "look into things".

Disclaimer: I'm in an English PhD program.

Regarding the parent's comment about adjuncting, no one who goes into an English PhD program expects they'll get a tenure track job out of it, and if they do believe such a thing, they likely shouldn't be in the program in the first place. Professors and the Modern Language Association remind us of the awful working conditions we can expect. No one goes into this field thinking we've found the next big lucrative market to exploit. Most of us would be ecstatic if we landed an R1 gig, but except for those at the top universities, we realize it's highly unlikely.

Learning to write and communicate should be emphasized more in English programs, but I fear the turn to a strictly compositional program will detract from what English majors actually do: read and interpret really well. My limited understanding of Computer Science undergraduate courses suggests that you don't actually learn "to program," you learn to solve problems in algorithmic ways with code; the code itself is merely a means to an end.

As a side note (and I don't do much work in this particular subfield), the work being done with code in English departments seems to be breathing new life into the field. The work on automated genre detection, and, more generally, the move from 200-some canonical texts to 'large datasets,' is bringing us unexpected funding while encouraging students to learn enough code to squeak by at an entry-level job.

> After you've mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer, English class is your oyster. My sister refused to be cynical, grappled with the texts and worked out some genuinely beautiful prose, and barely passed.

There is something to it. I got really great grades for my writing during school years, and the best works were usually either overly-honest-offtopics (that is, I believed I had more important real-life point to make), or cleverly disguised cynical criticisms of the whole idea of literature classes (I had a friend who was very cynical and direct in his writing, as he plainly didn't care; while he didn't get good grades for it, I remember his writings as the most interesting and fun to read). Things got easier for me when I learned how to bullshit my way out of any writing assignment (a surprisingly useful skill for university as well).

You extrapolate from your own experience to "the English major" to "the humanities".

Studying a language (with its multiple aspects, i.e. culture, literature, linguistics) opens up a variety of uses, from a cultural planning and administration perspective, a way into publishing, academia, teaching, consulting etc.

If you think all of the humanities is bullshitting your way through by espousing hollow phrases about "the bourgeoisie's consumerism", then you, frankly have not gotten the point. The interesting thing isn't "what the author believes" or even "what the author meant". This already shows the fundamental limitedness of the insights gained, which are the insights of "having taken a course in literature as an undergrad once".

> "After you've mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer"

Maybe this is just me being pseudointellectually bemused and sneering, however, I think we should probably think more about the bourgeois consumerism and might even come to the point where we can make the leap from "once upon a time an author wrote..." to our own life and our own time and society.

Your use of anecdote is certainly well chosen for HN and will resonate with the "innovating crowd" here, most of which do not see that there is a difference in approach and method between "appreciating a book" and studying it. At the very least since the 70s (and arguably earlier, depending on place and orientation), a study of literature or language is a study of a culture. There is a good reason why many of the more eminent philosophers that are still regarded as meaningful today dedicated so much time to literature, music or the arts. Literature lets us gain a deeper understanding of the social forces at a given time, prevalent and deviant opinions, habits, everyday life and social experience.

What you know as English class is a class in close reading, which bears little resemblance to research and the knowledge gained.

I am well aware that this is going to be unpopular here, especially given your position. Yet I find it slightly worrying how HN brings together the arrogance of engineering with a wider disregard not just for the academy (which is fine), but cultivates a particular form of anti-intellectualism that is all to prevalent in the US (and also elsewhere, though the US seem to particularly stand out). At least I would like to voice my dissenting opinion and try to convey that things might not be quite so simple.

Apparently an English Major enables you to fill an entire page without providing any arguments at all. That's definitely a useful skill.

Haha, this. Exactly what I was thinking when reading the article.

Paul Krugman recently had a blog post that touched upon a somewhat more general trend: the decline of "human capital" as it was, for some decades, associated with a broadly liberal education:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/devaluing-human-...

"Nancy Folbre suggests that the golden age of human capital – roughly speaking, the era in which the economy strongly demanded the kinds of skills we teach in liberal-arts colleges and universities – is already behind us. She may well be right: after a long stretch when both technology and trade seemed to be undermining only manual labor, it does look as if many skilled occupations are now under threat by Big Data, Bangalore, or both."

Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly? Seems like one or two classes would do.

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.

> 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."

Just such claims are made in the "You need to have a degree" / "degrees are worthless" debates held hereabouts on a bi-monthly basis.

One or two classes would do, for the vast majority of tasks people accomplish with code. Lots of the more `advanced' topics aren't really that hard to learn on your own.

Besides, when was the last time you looked at the curriculum for a CS or CSE major? There are some code courses, but also lots and lots of of writing, math, and physics.

> 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.

You appear to have missed my joke. This clearly is a HN that largely believes that CS degrees are unnecessary.

That would be the normal world, not the bizarro one. Most people here don't even have CS degrees, but picked up the relevant material as a hobby or on the job. And furthermore, would recognize that such real-world experience is much more important for what they do than what you learn in an artificial academic environment.

> Do you really need to study a full English major to learn to write properly?

It's not clear to me that majors are things that are studied, especially English ones.

I don't follow you. To complete a major you take a certain number of courses in a subject. Or are you suggesting that English majors don't learn anything?

If a major is a program of study, then to study a major is to study a program of study. It's possible, of course, but I don't think that's what most majors do. And English ones especially would see the subtle language implications here. (As you can see we're both already abusing the term: majors are also those that enroll in a particular program of study, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to study them.)

It just seemed ironic that a question about the validity of an English major was perhaps incorrect in its use of English, that's all. Not a big deal. Not even sure if I'm right, I've just never heard "to study a major" before.

Thanks for illuminating the conversation by demonstrating pedantry of the type so often heard from English majors. You've done so to cleverly illustrate part of the reason the major is on its way to irrelevance, no doubt.

It seems like you're having a bad day, so I've given you an upvote.

I'm just wondering if your username is a reference to Virek from Count Zero.

Do you need the degree to learn the technical details about how to write in English properly? No.

Do you need the degree to learn a small sampling of the breadth of English literature to draw on for examples, metaphors, similes, tropes and what-not to use in written communications? Probably not, if you're quite well-read.

Do you need the degree to learn how to craft an argument and the differences among presenting it as an essay, a dialogue, a monologue, or poetry? Probably not, especially if you've got the Philosophy degree.

But, if your goal is to communicate effectively, with a wide audience, it doesn't hurt.

And it does not necessarily prevent one from excelling in I/T.

This is something you build up to over a long period of time, not in one or two classes or even cramming it into four years.

To my eye there is a major problem with the piece. Studying English Literature is not just learning how to write. Not is it the only way to learn how to write. One might, for example, argue that philosophy is a superior training in how to construct a coherent argument. It is supposedly also learning how to read. And IMHO this has been profoundly corrupted by the poisonous influence of a series of 'schools' informed by half digested Continental philosophers. Such philosophers are muddy enough for other philosophers and associated wannabes, but such obscurantism has been a horrific influence on the humanities. Reading through the filter of one or other of these corrupting lenses diminishes pleasure in the the text. No wonder people don't enjoy reading any more.

I'm one of those English majors who pops up in interesting places (in this case, software engineering).

After more than a decade in the field, I continue feeling that my degree was excellent preparation for writing code. Allow me some bullet points:

* The typical English major is drilled in taking an impenetrable text and constructing an interpretive narrative (an essay). Much of the major involves writing essay after essay and having it critiqued by professors. The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives. With that understanding can come depression or the knowledge that there is never a single interpretation, and that you are looking at one facet of an ineffable infinite. If you are not overcome by dread, this skill comes in handy when it comes to interpreting business requirements.

* A well trained English major is the first to point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct -- that it is but one of several paradigmatic interpretations, and is, furthermore, culturally situated. Once again, this either brings nihilistic paralysis or a 'skillful means'-type approach where you tend to respect and incorporate other peoples' viewpoints. A piece of programming is ultimately the synthesis of many viewpoints, and the skillful developer must understand that they are channeling the viewpoints of all the project stakeholders when they put pen to paper.

* The close reading of poetry, especially poetry across multiple cultures and viewpoints, is excellent preparation for reading and appreciating other peoples' code--the most lacking skill in the industry today. You adopt the same mindset as a reader of poetry--first and foremost, trying to understand the situation of the author. Secondly, examining and critiquing your own visceral response -- are you irritated because the code is stupid, or is it perhaps written in a way that is consistent with an approach you do not yet understand? Thirdly, understanding that you are reading highly structured text -- what is the discipline behind the programming language you're encountering? How do its keywords and cadences lend themselves towards certain modes of expression and functionality?

* In a more theoretically oriented English degree, there is much focus on language as a construct -- as the lens through which you view the world. This is incredibly true in software development, where the narrative of the code can be so oblique to the narrative on the server (for example, the way in which most modern languages behave implicitly through inheritence, and the way in which structural code can only begin to point at the interaction between threads, processes, and servers).

* As an English major, I understand that I am coming from my own experiences, and I believe that the understandings I mentioned above can be gotten in any field of study. I do feel that my English major was valuable in particular because of the emphasis on the critique of the student's writing. Over the course of several years, my fundamental assumptions about anything and everything were repeatedly and effectively critiqued by my professors.

"The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives... A well trained English major is the first to point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct"

In other words, humility. You learn it in science and engineering, too. It's hard to get through rigorous training in those fields without grappling with your own limits. You can't fake it. In computer science, the computer lets you know when you've failed. In science, the data tells you when you're wrong, and, failing that, there's peer review. In math, you have proofs. Any endeavor that is empirical and data-driven exposes nonsense efficiently and ruthlessly.

I agree that certain axioms can be verified or disproven, but larger questions remain arguable in both science and the humanities (if those can be truly separated). For example, you can verify that a linked list works, or that an operation is associative... but when you zoom out and look at whether or not a codebase with millions of lines of code is successfully doing what it sets out to do... The act of assessing that is similar to assessing Milton's motivation for his depiction of limbo. The interpretations defy a single right or wrong answer.

Is it possible that the decline also has to do with the decline in quality of humanities teaching? My undergrad writing "teacher" was a terrible grad student, intent on pushing a social agenda on the class. I certainly wasn't going to take any more than I had to. My "intensive writing" teacher has a very extreme political agenda attached to a geography class. I sucked it up, but vowed never to venture into his department either.

I don't think it's pure practicality that's holding English back. Many CEOs are English and History majors. It's the quality of the teaching.

The necessity of studying one's own language is the problem. Most of what is read in English should have been read before college begins. And what's left? There is no language to master as there is with a French or Classics major, save some specialty work in old/middle English. The interesting linguistics are covered by that field. Education majors cover the pedagogical aspects just fine. So, the only thing that can be left is remedial reading or inventing new fields of study, and the invented fields aren't rewarding ends or means financially or intellectually.

I read more books before I started college than most of my liberal arts college graduated friends have read in their entire lives.

Some of them still haven't read Orwell.

Though even though I am a dyslexic I recall in my classical studies class I was the only one who read all of Thucydides as well as several extra plays by Euripides and Xenophon "the march up country"

Besides a decline in overall literacy, which from personal impression is not a requirement for a English degree, I wonder if we can say this trend reflects an the accessibility of a college education.

Perhaps, 30 years ago Yale boys could afford to get an English degree because they were guaranteed cushy jobs at Goldman-Sachs where their dad and granddad were partners. Now some kid programming in what once was an Indonesian island took their job.

Deep down, I just knew I'd be blown away by both the thoughtfulness and prose in this thread. I was right. Thank you fellow HN'ers!

Any attempt to justify time spent in pursuit of an English Lit degree inevitably sounds smug/condescending. You have to say general things like it teaches you how to write and think and appreciate the breadth of human experience - but then you are implying that everybody else must be lacking in those areas, which sounds terrible.

The English major has been declining for at least a decade, due to the offshoring of coveted jobs for English majors such as writing poetry. [1]

[1] http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html

Don't overestimate the importance of your undergrad major. The value of your degree is based on the caliber of the institution from which you received it.

As a history major myself I can tell you firsthand that a humanities degree does not make one unemployable.

English major to a master's in psychology to self-trained programmer, see the pattern?

I was interested in all three, but programming was the only one that grabbed me in a wow, I really want to dive into this world, kind of way.

Writing well is one of the only ways to scale your impact beyond face-to-face, but you don't have to be writing about literature. Pomona taught me to write, even though I was a computer science major.

Steinbeck, Wells, Shaw,Twain

College dropouts.

The article gets it completely wrong. One studies writing as an English major the way one studies programming as a computer science major. That is, the best way to do it is to inspire via other subjects that will enliven the entire career.

I'm a highly skilled software engineer who was an English and Classics major at at top liberal arts college. The author of the article seems to be an authority, but he is not. Most professors of literature that I respect would look down on his attempt to generalize about the whole field based on a narrow non-fiction / writing practioner-esque approach.

The reason you study English is to study literature which is the most important concentration of knowledge, distilled, evolved and selected as to what is important in the past several centuries. There is figuratively nothing actually more important (if there were, someone would've written a f-ing story). Science, by comparison, is young.

The study of literature is a celebration of what is important in life. And how to live life. And how to find what is important to you in terms of each second that you live on this planet, Steve Jobs / death at your back philosophically-speaking (those are all English majory ideas -- Marvell in that case).

But back to my original point. One studies computer science to understand the philosophy of how computers might be designed and used (see the Abelson SICP lectures or whatever), not to learn how to implement some Java standard interface. Though that is a little part of the practice that one has to do. Same thing with writing.

I took zero writing courses, but wrote over a hundred essays on other writers and it was one of the best preparations for any field -- law, science, software engineering (in my case).

Also the proper way to study literature -- ignoring all the postmodernist and cultural theory baggage -- is to study words closely and this has a long, rigorous history that again rivals any other analytical tradition. Has English studies lost its way? Sure, it always does because it's such a ridiculously large undertaking. Are more targeted philologies and close readings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading ) important? Sure.

But just because the typical English major isn't as employable without other skills, doesn't mean the field itself is a bad one. But I think people get upset about it because it is such a tricky field to make a career in and can burn you if you think it is.

But one doesn't set out to become an astronaut by taking astronaut classes. You have to have another broader drive. Among those who value intelligence, however, the study of literature (f- writing -- great writing has no place in the university except as a place to study it, if you ask me -- it's not primarily designed to teach writing in the world because academia does not exist primarily in the world -- it's designed to teach understanding of past writing which is precisely 'what we know', as Eliot would say, etc.).

Anyway, as much as it pains me to give any credence to the idiots there:

http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20f...

They know enough to know that English is equal to many other pursuits of knowledge. Will it evolve to a more targeted literary analysis? Maybe. But there is nothing more important than the study of great literature. If this upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved, basically.

>Science, by comparison, is young.

The age of literature makes it static; there is no hurry to participate. I can pursue literature leisurely (and with very little financial investment) over the course of my lifetime. Science, on the other hand, is more dynamic; if you want to contribute to the cutting edge you will likely need credentials to access the resources to do so. A degree in the sciences opens doors in ways that the humanities do not: the great works of literature are available to anyone at my local library, but only a very small group of experts gets to test their theories on the Large Hadron Collider. Studying the humanities in college therefore has a significant opportunity cost, to say nothing of the cost of tuition.

Computer science is a prominent exception, though. There is much more acceptance in that discipline for self-taught experts.

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