Productivity

I don’t think it’s any secret that one of the biggest challenges to English is its failure to put students on a specified career track. While students majoring in chemistry, for instance, know they are going to be chemists and are able to work towards this title, those majoring in English can choose a multitude of paths – educator, business(wo)man, writer, journalist, and so on. An argument against the study of English that Moran brings up in Interdisciplinarity is that “unlike many other disciplines, English does not make a strong connection between education and training for future careers” (18). While this reasoning does have a point, and the future career of an English major is admittedly less defined than that of a science major, I don’t think this statement is one that necessarily reflects badly on the English discipline. Sure, it can be intimidating to acknowledge that I’m not really sure in which direction I’m headed, but valuing a discipline based only on its career potential is an attitude I just can’t get behind.

Moran states that “science and professional subjects…tend to be targeted at specific areas of the graduate marketplace, and service the economy with ‘human capital’ in concrete ways” (18). With this in mind, it’s easy to see why there is contention over the existence of English as a discipline – it doesn’t contribute to the economy or technology of a society in obvious ways, and its value can’t always be defined in terms of money or production numbers. However, a piece I found on The New Yorker’s site entitled “Why Teach English?” raises an argument to this view that I wholeheartedly agree with. In the article, Adam Gopnik reasons “No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die.” In other words, society needs more than an efficient economy and technological advancements, as important as they are. There needs to be meaning and a sense of purpose in order for people to truly thrive, and English studies play a part in fulfilling this need. Gopnik believes that a worthwhile civilization only exists with “what amounts to an English department—texts that mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered…” With this in mind, I’ll conclude that while the English major may not set me up for a specific, concrete job in the future, I’m content with the belief that it will have use to both my community and me nonetheless.

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