I would disagree with the essay at least in the snark about Obama: I think he actually represents the embrace of the liberal arts. The ability to spin words, to use words to lift up, express, define — these are the fruit of working in the humanities.

The humanities are at the end conservative: they conserve our culture by linking us with our past (”the democracy of our ancestors” as Johnson once put it): we read and speak the same words as others, and so share with them across the centuries a similar feeling. Humanities are also the tool by which we engage the forces of mediocrity and spin; we read so we can end the cant. Last, we study because it is democratic. Any one can read, any one can mine the riches of this conversation. That is its essential beauty. That is why we can not let English recede back within the ivied halls of privilege.

On that, Jacques Barzun was especially eloquent, too. (Thank you Sawgunner for the shout out).

Report comment to moderator

And thank you Kimberly #9 above for the splendid quotes. Superb prose within its pages was first what lead me to read NATIONAL REVIEW. Now alas the chief prose-writer/raconteur reclines with the great narrative masters of all time: the likes of Shakespeare, King David and your own beloved Milton

Report comment to moderator

But teaching English wasn’t the reason I majored in that. (That’s too practical and blase). I used to be an English Education major, and then I switched, ’cause I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach.

Report comment to moderator

I love English–its literature and beauty, and the ideas it expresses.

Shall I provide a few examples?

Dante: Be satisfied with So it is , O Man, for if you could have known the entire plan, Mary would not have had to bear a son.

Milton: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees its adversary, but slinks out of that race in which that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

Novalis: Unser Leben ist kein Traum, aber es soll und wird veilleicht einer werden.

MacDonald: But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.

Fitzgerald: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Eliot: I have known the mornings, evenings, afternoons; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Report comment to moderator

Report comment to moderator

Report comment to moderator

The standard answer for lefties is spend more money. If that were true and that humanitarian and liberal arts make for finer students in math and the hard sciences, since the USA spends way more money on liberal humanitarian education than any nation on the planet by far, especially k-12, we should have by far the best students. Instead we have very average ones. So your premise of money and arts is what make for fine students burns up in the face of fact once again.

But of course we wouldn’t know that if we did not know the facts and know that money and teaching liberal arts have little to do with scholastic achievement. It would seem that money and humanities point to poor scholastics instead. But I’m not blaming you for not being able to figure this out.

You are the product of a socialist education that has failed horribly. It teaches flawed logic, erroneous assumptions and flawed conclusions. Sadly, you will suffer for it though.

Kimberly,

What are the reasons for making english your major if you are not going to teach it again? I majored in Architecture without having any plans of ever practicing it but this reasoning was because there were no jobs in it that paid more than flipping hamburgers

Report comment to moderator

I loved my degree and feel I learned to think and reason and challnge ideas outside the culture I grew up in.

It always frustrated me when people looked at me and asked, “So you must want to teach?” as if a desire to teach was the only possible reason to get a degree in English.

Report comment to moderator

I went to a very respected engineering school, one with a very weak humanities program, and it’s only because my homeschooling parents made me do ridiculous amounts of literature/Latin/logic/history/philosophy work that I have any real ability to reason or, say, hold a political or religious discussion devoid of name-calling. Learning all the math and software engineering and business processes in the world didn’t prepare me for anything except the 9-5. And I’d like to think education is about more than getting a job.

Report comment to moderator

Oh, and except for the “tyrant” and “misogynist” part.

I know that all the math and science geeks, not to mention business adminstration people, roll their eyes at the suggestion that kids know a bit about the humanities, but they are what make all that concrete knowledge, technology and organization matter.

Report comment to moderator