The End of English?
Posted on June 24th, 2013 in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
In the Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes on “The Decline and Fall of the English Major.”
Most of the students he sees are pretty poor writers, Klinbkenborg says. (Something I find generally true in my line of work; today’s young people can write a helluva snarky comment for Gawker; not so good at writing a lot else.)
They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon.
Clearly they have been reading the Harvard Gazette.
Part of the problem, Klinkenborg argues, is that fewer and fewer students are majoring in the humanities.
There is a certain literal-mindedness in the recent shift away from the humanities. It suggests a number of things. One, the rush to make education pay off presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring (though that doesn’t explain the current popularity of political science). Two, the humanities often do a bad job of explaining why the humanities matter. And three, the humanities often do a bad job of teaching the humanities. You don’t have to choose only one of these explanations. All three apply.
That strikes me as a pretty reasonable explanation of the situation. I also think that the enormous and quick riches offered by Internet success lure young people away from the humanities—just one hit app and you’re a billionaire!—and all the discussion from rich tech guys about why kids should skip college isn’t helping either. Of course, sky-high college tuitions also push kids toward majors that seem more likely to translate into jobs than humanities majors……
10 Responses
6/25/2013 8:34 am
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I think the problem just starts much sooner. My kid’s at Boston Latin School, presumably a great school. His writing stinks, he arguments are totally illogical, and his grades are just fine - at a competitive school. Am I expecting too much? Do they even teach writing? I think this is common, and worse in some schools. Not sure what to make of it, but somehow I don’t think the lack of humanities majors is the problem.
6/25/2013 2:34 pm
True enough about schools, but many well educated people learned to write only when they were old enough to have something worth saying. In colleges in research universities, writing is pretty much the domain of a special group of off ladder instructors, some of whom are marvelous but of course everyone knows they are low caste. It all goes back to the incentive and reward system for faculty. Even English professors don’t get any credit for correcting and improving student writing. When I do it my students are bewildered; I am not playing my position properly. And at Harvard anyway there is not much modeling of the importance of graceful prose style. I have heard from several alums and more than a few faculty about the campaign launch manifesto, which really should have been worked over by one of those Expos preceptors.
http://www.harvard.edu/president/harvard-campaign
6/25/2013 2:37 pm
What am I missing here regarding the end of English?
From the NYT, with regard to The Court’s voting rights decision:
“In his administration, the job of proposing specific new laws falls to Mr. Obama’s attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., who used similar language to disparate the court’s decision in separate remarks delivered at the Justice Department.
6/25/2013 3:20 pm
Let us hope that that is a typo, Sam. Otherwise the world is coming to an end.
6/25/2013 3:23 pm
So here is a story that I think has larger implications: A friend of mine, about my age, edited a San Francisco magazine which had an active website. Like most websites, the content on it was written by people in their 20s. My friend the editor was constantly finding mistakes of grammar, punctuation and spelling in their online writing. When she urged these young people to take more care and to correct their work, they answered, “What’s the point? It’s just going to be pushed off the main page in an hour or so anyway….” It made more professional sense for them to create new “content” than to improve the existing material—or get it right the first time.
6/25/2013 4:00 pm
RB: I don’t think it was a typo. The Attorney General in his remarks did not disparage (which would be the typo) The Court. Even if used, the word disparage would have been used incorrectly. This was just a reporter who did not know what a particular word meant, but used it nonetheless. It sounded good and she used it. The world is coming to an end.
Harry, thanks for the link. That’s some highfalutin language. The President’s office really does need an Expos preceptor; a young Richard Marius would be the right person.
6/25/2013 8:42 pm
From the campaign manifesto: “We must sustain the remarkable community of researchers, teachers, learners, and staff who are at once Harvard’s engine and its heart.”
Did Drew Faust read this document before putting her name on it?
Pick a sentence, any sentence! I chose this one randomly.
“In all it undertakes, Harvard must transcend the immediate and instrumental to explore and understand what humans have thought and done in order to imagine where they might best seek to go.”
6/26/2013 12:38 am
All humanities teaching is the teaching of writing.
6/26/2013 10:09 am
To Anonymous 8:42pm: There are two allusions in the sentence you pick at random from the Humanities document. The words “the immediate and instrumental” allude to the General Education program, its interest in “hands-on learning,” and its aim to connect with “life after Harvard.” This part of the sentence argues against interpreting these aspects of the Gen Ed program-and other course offerings at Harvard-in merely practical ways, for example as preparation for students’ future jobs. The words “what humans have thought and done” are an adaptation of two famous phrases by Matthew Arnold in his book “Culture and Anarchy” (1869 and its preface of 1875): “the best that has been thought and known” and “the best which has been thought and said.” To recognize these allusions and the ways in which they are modified here is to see that the sentence is somewhat less vapid than it might otherwise appear.
6/27/2013 9:52 pm
When it comes to calling out bad writing, why stop with the campaign launch manifesto? The gassy, ponderous style of the recent “Mapping the Future” report effectively answers that report’s own question of why Harvard students are fleeing the humanities. I don’t mean to suggest here that the vigorous embrace of turgid prose is limited to the Harvard humanities faculty. I teach science at a large public university, where (like Professor Lewis) I regularly correct my students’ written work. A few years ago, a student I had dinged repeatedly for writing clunky and indecipherable sentences explained to me that she had been following the guidance of a humanities professor, who had instructed her class to write more like Judith Butler. I’d say if you’re encouraging your students to emulate a scholar who has been repeatedly lambasted for her opaque and obfuscating prose (Dutton 1998, “Bad Writing Contest” press release; Nussbaum 1999, “The Professor of Parody,” The New Republic), you’re part of the problem and not part of the solution.