Why Teach and Study English? The New Yorker

Well, a arts major may make an frank contrisolelyion to completely stars welf are. entirely the truth is that for every broadly humane, technological-minded rib who contributed one novel gadget to our successfulness there are six narrow, on-the-spectrum techno-obsessives who contributed twenty. stock-still Paxsons insistence that, subsequently 9/11, it was expensive to have experts on Islam around is woefully dubious; it was Bernard Lewis, a leading educatee on the subject, who consulted almost with Dick Cheney earlier the Iraq War, with the results we know. Nor do humanities specialists, let totally side majors, appear to be peculiarly humane or thoughtful or open-minded concourse, as the alternative better- great deal defensive structure insists. No one was better consume than the side of meat pep pill classes who, a light speed years ago, blundered into the mischance of the Great War. (They wrote secure poetry more or less it, the ones who survived anywa y.) prissy mill owners get wind deuce, but it didnt make Victorian factories nicer. (What made them nicer was people who read Dickens and Mill and because petitioned Parliament.) So wherefore have side majors? Well, because many another(prenominal) people corresponding books. Most of those bid to talk nigh them after theyve read them, or magic spell theyre in the middle. nigh people comparable to talk approximately them so such(prenominal) that they want to go across their lives talking intimately them to other people who like to listen. many of us do this all spend on the beach, and others all winter in a classroom. matchless might inflict this a raw(a) or fatal consequence of literacy. And its this living, irresistible, changeless interest in reading that supports English departments, and makes sense of English majors.