Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education by Edmundson Mark

Author:Edmundson, Mark [Edmundson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

The English Major

Lately, when the time of year comes for college sophomores to trundle off to the offices of their faculty advisers to declare their majors, it’s not hard to predict what’s going to happen. There will be more economics majors surely and more business majors too. What there almost certainly won’t be are more English majors. The English major has been declining drastically over the past decades. In 1970, about 8 percent of students were English majors; by 2004 (the last date for which figures are available), it was 4 percent. By now it may be down to 2 or 3. It’s distressing to me, and not just because I happen to be an English prof. I think that a lot of students are making a mistake—losing one of the greatest chances life offers. If I could, I’d yell over the transoms of my colleagues’ offices in economics and business and all the other purportedly success-ensuring disciplines.

I’d tell the kids to drop what they were doing and get themselves over to the English department. I’d tell them to sign on before it was too late.

An English major, you see, is much more than thirty-two or thirty-six credits including a course in Shakespeare, a course on writing before 1800, and a three-part survey of English and American lit. That’s the outer form of the endeavor. It’s what’s inside that matters. It’s the character forming—or (dare I say?) Soul-making—dimension of the pursuit that counts. And what is that precisely? Who is the English major in his ideal form? What does the English major have and what does he want and what does he in the long run hope to become?

The English major is, first of all, a reader. She’s got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves—they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay—to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, to be Jane Austen, to be Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games? The English major wants the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of changing minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen is one that is incomparably enriching. It makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined was possible. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.