By CHRISTOPHER SURPRENANT
Managing Editor
Those of us studying the so-called “humanities” often have a harder time explaining our choice of major to the general population than our more scientifically-minded counterparts. It’s not easy to explain how reading Greek poetry or Modernist stream-of-consciousness novels are valuable in a world that is focusing more and more on math and science. Addressing the English and English education majors on campus, there is value in the English major, and it is our job to defend it.
Defending it, however, will prove difficult if we do not take ourselves and our major seriously. As English majors, it is safe to assume that we love to read and write, correct? It’s disturbing when fellow English majors declare that they’ve “mastered the art of BS-ing” or when they say that they read summaries over the assigned texts because they “haven’t got the time.” Pardon me, but if you haven’t got the time to devote to your chosen major, what are you doing?
The “art of BS-ing,” as some so eloquently call it, reduces the study of English to a major that is composed of loose, incoherent thoughts, magically strung together by the lucky individual who makes a fleeting connection during class discussion and the sub-par summary he read online. To rely on the “art” of BS-ing when studying English is to say that the works ranging from the timeless to the obscure have little value beyond a seat-of-your-pants thought.
If we are to defend the study of English, we as English majors must recognize the genuine value in what we are learning and discussing. To be fully engaged in the study of English, we must read, we must think, we must realize that the authors we are studying had something to offer this world, something valuable that has contributed to their long-lasting appeal.
For those of us tackling the admirable job of teaching tomorrow’s youth, it is imperative that future students realize that to “BS” something is to marginalize it, to make it less important than something else. If you are going to be an English teacher, why would you expect students to care about something that you barely care about yourself?
With the implementation of the Common Core standards, informational texts formally reserved for history and social studies classes have sneaked their ways into English classrooms. This makes it all the more difficult to spend the appropriate amount of time on works of fiction that, as we know, teach us all just as much about the human condition and are equally as challenging.
While we don’t need to necessarily enjoy everything we read, we need to be able to explain to others why it matters. Why is Shakespeare relevant today? Why does To Kill a Mockingbird matter to race outside the 1960s? Why is Virginia Woolf important to equality between men and women? The answers cannot be written in one sentence. They are long and complex, and they overlap with other distinguished disciplines. To assign a one-note response to these questions is to undermine their importance. The fact that these questions demand such long answers is a testament to their value, as well as a testament to the intelligence of English majors who have thought deeply and seriously about them.
English majors must treat their studies with dignity or be overrun by disciplines that have been deemed more important or more crucial to the future success of this country. Whether a student plans to go into advertising, teaching, television, publishing, or any of the fields English studies apply to (and there are many), we must handle our major with great sincerity. It should not be a degree earned under false pretenses and wasted time.
Math and science have their place in this world, and they have, without dispute, made this world a better place. However, the study of English and its counterparts are the disciplines that will always be concerned with humanity and the never-ending questions tied up within it that no algorithm will ever be able to solve. To quote Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, “What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
