Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English Since e Radical Sixties? by Patrick Brantlinger (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2013)
Because in America we speak Spanish and a hundred other languages.
Maybe a generation of glorifying Spanish to welcome illegal alien invaders? People have pillared English, no wonder no one wants to study it.
The only job you can get is college prof teaching English majors?
Thats why speling and grammer is so common in the media these days?
Because Garrison Keillor
I always wondered way anyone took it as a major. Perhaps the students want to have a marketable skill after university.
cuz ppl txt today, & hav 4gottn how 2 uz eng.
For the same reasons that cursive, spelling and grammar are no longer taught.
It used to be (maybe back in the 1950’s or earlier), that someone with a degree in English could be counted on to be proficient in understanding complex material, and writing about subjects with clarity and precision. There would be lots of jobs for people with those skills, in management, staff, etc.
Those days appear to be long gone, and being an English major is where you go after finding more job-oriented majors to be too hard.
There was a time when you had to be really intelligent to be an English major to comprehend the complexity and nuance of language and literature. Unfortunately academic English departments have devolved into crass political cabals that merely adhere to the leftist narrative. Most “professors” even at “premiere” universities cannot be described as real scholars. It has been worse than a dumbing down. Rational students avoid these programs.
My daughter has an associates in English. She works for a publisher and hopes to become a proofreader or editor.
She’s off today and is probably standing in a used book store as we speak.
Bingo.
“Bauerlein said that the English classes of today’s world have an atmosphere of resentment and “the study of these social issues is not analytical scholarship, but a class about victimization.” Bauerlein said he feels that students are less likely to take these classes because they go to college to learn, not to feel bad about themselves.”
I was an English major over 25 years ago. For the most part, professors didn’t attack Western culture.
Paying a fortune to a college for something you can get by just reading is nonsense.
As an aside, I took a course in my senior year of undergrad school entitled "Study of the Short Story." We had a text book that focused mostly on James Joyce. I read the text book before the course started and would have been bored to tears except that I sat behind a really cute girl.
The professor added absolutely nothing that I couldn't have gotten from the library or book store.
English majors cannot even teach English in public schools because the teachers unions and the education mafia has shut them out in favor of education majors, the dumping ground for underachieving students.
English grammar should be a required subject for journalism students. You don’t have to read much of their work to understand why. At the same time,this should be learned in high school & you shouldn’t have to pay any college a fortune for this knowledge.
Its not just English. Its History and Philosophy as well. But the professors in these areas teach coarses that are required but are really anti-white male coarses. The reality is that History, Philosophy and English don’t get you a job. And frankly College English is not the way we write any more.
Because the Left ruined it. I majored in English back in the Dark Ages when they were in the process of AIDSing it. I can’t imagine how bad it is now. My guess is that every course is a variation on “A Marxist-Feminist Perspective on Feminism and Marxism”.
To paraphrase a response I (finally) gave one professor after he asked why it was important to study English:
Many people no longer value the great ideals of this country so why should they bother with the language those ideals were expressed in?
Besides, being an Anglophile (in the sense of preferring the English language) must rely be xenophobic and bigoted, right?
Sure, the race/class/gender emphasis doesn't help, it seems like reading books and having good grammar have become less and less a part of our culture. TV, movies, music, video games are more likely to strike a chord with many people than books.
Communications and creative writing departments have benefited from the fact that even young people who are more verbal than mathematical don't want to have to read Beowulf, Sidney, and Spenser.