“The End of the English Major”

In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes about “The End of the English Major.” Here’s Amanda Claybaugh, a Harvard professor, speaking:

“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Which reminds me of something I wrote after listening to the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong :

I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.

Just one factor among many, but a factor.

[One aside: An English department is at odds with itself if its students get tote bags that say (or brag?) “CURRENTLY READING” but its professors think the department “should do more with TV.”]