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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spot-on, IMO.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.