When we dropped off our son last fall at an out-of-state college, my wife and I hoped he’d find a new social circle that would help him get through the inevitable ups and downs of undergraduate life. But now that he’s told us he’s thinking of becoming an English major, our worries appear to be over: He’ll automatically be a member of the biggest support group in the country.
If you doubt my word, try Google-searching under “English majors.” When I did this recently, results “1-10 of about 1.9 million” for that phrase turned up no less than nine Web sites focused on career opportunities for those impractical enough to select this academic pursuit. Those Google computers, by the way, identified 1.9 million Internet references to English majors in 0.25 seconds — a megahertzian calculation that the computer engineers who seem poised to rewrite our recorded knowledge might understand, but that English majors might find suitable only as the inspiration for a new poem, one that might take about 0.25 million seconds to fret over, revise, research and, finally, scratch out on paper.
One of those first-10 Google-identified Web pages leads with this headline: “A Public Service Message from Mississippi State University’s English Department.” It offers the following reassuring words: “Some students who enjoy English courses hesitate to major in the subject because they think that few career options are open to English majors. Nothing could be further from the truth. The stereotype of the English major as a grammar-spouting schoolmarm or wild-eyed poet has always been a convenient myth for people who have trouble with the first two of the three R’s.”
You go, schoolmarms!
The Mississippi State site follows with a list of English majors who have “prominently offended against the stereotype” — a list including actress Jodi Foster, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, among many others.
As far as I can tell, there is not one spelling or grammatical error on the entire Web page.
Only hit number four of the first 10 in my Google search turned up something related to literature itself. A Rutgers University site called “A Reading List for English Majors” undertakes the ambitious task of distilling the works in our language — from Beowulf to The Great Gatsby — into a greatest-hits compilation for those seeking to be literary. (Some might add A Confederacy of Dunces to the list, but isn’t that hitting a bit below the belt?)
I interpret the one-in-10 ratio of career support to literature this way: The one-tenth of the time an English major does not sp/files/storyimages/defending his or her choice of academic tracks can actually be spent reading good books. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad trade-off. Four years of undergraduate work can pay off handsomely when you make the wisest selections in your neighborhood for the nightstand.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should interject here that I was a history major, which might best be described as a bookworm who lacks the imagination to deal with fiction. So I compreh/files/storyimages/liking the written word — and being forced to def/files/storyimages/it in a culture that prefers to read dollar signs.
This is why I applaud the Every 1 Reads initiative in the Jefferson County Public Schools, which is designed to raise the system’s estimated 18,000 poorly performing readers up to their grade level within four years. The 2005 Competitive City Report from the Greater Louisville Project touts this same goal and states, “Reading ability is the foundation of academic success.”
And that’s not just for English majors.
The person I consider the most sensible in all of Kentucky, the writer Wendell Berry, defends a similar point while questioning the direction of higher education. In a 1984 essay called “The Loss of the University,” Berry slices through the anti-academic tenor of the times, stating that “the thing being made by education now is not a fully developed human being; it is a specialist, a careerist, a graduate. . . . The specialized ‘fields’ have grown so complicated within themselves that the curriculum leaves no time for the broad and basic studies that would inform judgment.”
Hmm. Mr. Berry does not treat the English student, or the liberal-arts student for that matter, as an anachronism. Specialization, he seems to be saying, can only achieve the proper perspective if it comes after such studies.
“The need for broadly informed human judgment nevertheless remains,” Berry adds later in his essay, “and this need requires inescapably an education that is broad and basic.”
Gosh, I don’t see broadly informed judgment many places these days — from our partisan politicians in Washington on down to our increasingly uncritical media and our business leaders in relentless pursuit of market success.
Perhaps what we really need to do is to launch a campaign to engage our English majors in the decisions of the day rather than Google them into comic irrelevance — something like Every 1 Quotes Shakespeare. That, to me, is no laughing matter.
