Reading in Public No. 4: Much ado about English majors
An English educator ponders why students are fleeing the field
A few weeks ago, the New Yorker published an article titled The End of the English Major. The article was filled with troubling (depending on your views) and surprising (depending on your experience) statistics about how few college students are majoring in English and the humanities. I really appreciated this article and the conversations it’s started. Author Nathan Heller does a great job exploring a wide variety of reasons for this decline, avoiding oversimplifications, easy answers, and generational stereotypes.
One of the most interesting questions Heller proposes in his excellent piece is whether there is something about the way we are currently teaching English that is driving students away from the field. While the job market, rising student debt, and other economic factors are certainly contributing to this crisis in the English department, I’m personally even more curious about what English teachers might be doing to turn students off. What is happening in English classrooms at the high school and college level? How are teachers approaching reading there and how can we help more young people fall in love with the field? I’d been mulling over Heller’s insights for a few days considering what I had to say about this facet of the conversation when Pamela Paul beat me to it with a response of her own in the NYT op-ed section.
I agree with both Heller and Paul that it takes passion (and often a financial safety net) to decide to major in English. While a degree in English fosters writing, analysis, and critical thinking skills that are highly transferable, most English departments don’t do a great job of communicating (ironic, I know) the career paths available to their majors or setting those majors up with the internships and connections they need to succeed. Unless someone has their sights set on a pretty specific career path—think teaching or publishing—they’re more likely going into the field out of a love for reading and writing1.
So while it seems that the majority of students are staying away from the humanities because of the lack (real or perceived) of job prospects, it must also be true that fewer students are falling in love with the study of literature. Why is that?
Let me start by saying I strongly disagree with Paul’s opinion on this issue, and I’ve strongly disagreed with many of her recent takes. As the former editor of The New York Times Book Review, Paul seems to be enjoying her new role as bookish provocateur on the opinion team. In this latest piece, Paul tells us all what’s going wrong in America’s English classrooms—without talking to a single teacher or student2. Paul cites Common Core requirements and teaching to the test as problems, and then —in a truly baffling feat of rhetorical overreach—she suggests that students are beginning to hate English because teachers are including more “relevant and engaging” books in their classrooms. Paul thinks it is the study of classic texts that makes students love reading and gives them a sense of empowerment when it comes to reading any work of literature, and that giving kids books they might actually like is an insult to their intelligence. The books she cites as too easy for the classroom? The Outsiders, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Outsiders, and—I kid you not—The Bluest Eye.
There’s a host of other problems with Paul’s argumentation here3, but I’m going to try to engage with a small piece of her argument in good faith. Because I do agree that students need access to and support through complex texts in order to see the rigor, value, and delight in the study of English.
It is obvious from her article that Paul loved English class. It’s wonderful that she had such great experiences with the English literary canon. I did as well, as did most English educators I know. But Paul then proceeds to fall into the trap that many of those English teachers and a lot of readers do: she assumes that whatever ignited her own interest in books is what will work for others. I consider this to be one of the problems with the English curriculum as it stands, and perhaps one of the things keeping students away from the field. Because most English teachers love and adore the classics, we assume that our students will love and adore them too—if only they’re shown the way. Not only is this untrue in practice4 but it presupposes that an appreciation of the classics is one of the foremost signs of good critical reading. When students fail to appreciate these canonical texts, we can tend to think the problem lies with them—not with the way we’re teaching the book and certainly not with the book itself. But I’m not sure anyone needs to appreciate Moby Dick or The Canterbury Tales to be a good student of English, and they certainly don’t need to in order to love reading.
And I think here I need to differentiate between a love of reading and a love of studying English—because they are different things. In my experience (as a student, a teacher, and informal Instagram pollster), accessible books and choice reading helps people fall in love with reading. I believe it takes complex texts, in addition to those rich accessible texts, to get students to fall in love with English. What I mean here by complex texts is any piece of writing that allows students to read between the lines and develop their own interpretations of theme and meaning. Reading poems like Patterns and My Last Duchess was key to igniting my literary passion because I began to see that there was more to the language than what my initial reading offered. There is room for imagination, play, analysis, and—yes—critical thinking in complex texts.
But here’s the thing: often the classics are NOT complex—or at least they’re not brought into the classroom as such. They are taught in a way that suggests to young readers that there is only one acceptable interpretation. This type of teaching is soul-crushing, exclusionary, and just plain boring. And accessible books can absolutely be complex! More student-friendly literature often allows for more of that imagination, play, and analysis because students feel confident engaging with them and aren’t put-off by the believe that there’s only one right answer. That fosters a love not only of books but of critical thinking and a confidence in their own powers of observation and interpretation. So while I agree that I wouldn’t want to teach a syllabus comprised solely of books my students could breeze through and understand completely on their own, the idea that only canonical texts allow for rich analysis is elitist, and just plain wrong.
Heller makes a much more interesting point about the way English education happens in universities. Rather than blaming the texts educators choose, he considers that the way those educators encourage students to engage with their texts. English students may, he suggests, be more excited about conversations in which they get to explore texts more holistically—more viscerally.
One theory is that the critical practices have become too specialized. Once, in college, you might have studied “Mansfield Park” by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius—the way Vladimir Nabokov famously taught the novel5, and an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have to do with how most humans read? [According to author and professor] Rita Felski, “Contemporary critics pride themselves on their power to disenchant.” The disenchantment, at least, has reached students…Bring back the awe, some say, and students will follow.
I find this observation fascinating. And I do think awe is missing from the English classroom. While I am all for papers about patriarchal landscaping, perhaps there’s room for both specificity and expansiveness in the way we talk about books within the field. Students ought to appreciate the beauty of a poem even while explicating it to death. They ought to be able to share why they loved or loathed a character even while considering the character as allegorical for a cultural concept. They ought to be able to marvel at the way a book absorbed them completely even as they analyze it through a feminist Marxist lens. This “even as” or “both and” is what I love about the public scholarship I get to engage in here and through the Novel Pairings podcast.
Because if there is one thing I took away from my English major, it’s an appreciation for nuance and complexity. Students can read both classics and contemporary books. They can read books that will require the guidance of an expert and those that they can zip through over a weekend. We can have conversations minutely dissecting the diction of a single sentence and debate whether or not we ship Emma and Mr. Knightley. While I do believe that English teachers are overstretched and asked to do too much within their subject, modeling a wide variety of ways to read is, to me, something that should be prioritized.
I have more to say on this subject and more I want to share from the wealth of responses I received to my questions on Instagram. But for now, I want to sit with this idea of awe—to remember the teachers who inspired it in me, to consider the books that may ignite it in others, and to allow my current reading life to be as filled with wonder as it is alive with analysis.
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-Sara
This holds true in the very informal Instagram polling I did this week. I’ll share more results of that in future newsletters.
Any student of English could tell you this piece of rhetoric is lacking in both ethos and logos since Paul fails to either establish her own credibility on this topic or bring in experts and citations to build her claim.
I’m particularly appalled by Paul’s insinuation that teaching dead white male authors is a signal to students that they’re worthy and capable of reading good books.
Many of you shared with me on Instagram that analyzing old texts is what killed your love of read—The Scarlet Letter and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” were the most cited
The essay alluded to here is called Good Readers and Good Writers. It is one of my favorite pieces of writing about how to read well, and I will be exploring it in depth at a later date.
Thanks so much for this. I am an English major mom whose oldest kid is a first-year in college. He is strongly considering a drama/English double major, and I am all for it! Critical thinking and writing? Yes! Our Title One public HS isn't fantastic in the ELA department, BUT the AP Lit teacher (which is senior year) is incredible, and reading Beloved in that class with her was definitely a high point for my son. I get that STEM is important, but we need arts and writing, too!
One of the most important moments I remember from my undergrad years was having a college professor tell the class a literary analysis papers comparing two Frost poems could be whatever--it just had to be supported by the text. That was the first time I was able to approach texts as an expansive experience, rather than playing a torturous game of whack-a-mole with a English teacher's will to teach one way of interpreting an author's work.