I remember the day my mother stood with her back to me at the kitchen sink and explained to me why an English major was useless.
Choosing to go to community college over several other more prestigious and exciting colleges (including Geneseo) was a decision my mother had praised as practical and economical. But a degree in English?
“I know you love reading and those little stories you write, but you have to go learn to do something, you know? You’re too smart to waste it- you could become a doctor or a lawyer- but you need to learn a skill that someone will pay you for. Something other people can’t do! Everyone- well, mostly everyone, anyway- can read and write.”
It was hard for me to argue against that seven years ago, and it still is. In Joe Moran’s Interdisciplinarity he describes how as early as the Middle Ages, learning and knowledge stopped being valuable for its own sake as “the perceived need to relate education to specific economic… ends” [Moran 4] grew alongside commerce, business and society. This is a far cry from when Aristotle, as described earlier in the book, placed ‘productive’ disciplines like the ones my mother favored low on the totem pole. Today most people view a college education as a means to an end and value it because they can monetize off it, not because of the monotony of studying and attending class and being constantly strapped for cash and time. Growing up in a lower class family where a college education was a privilege, not a right, (and add to that I was working two part time jobs even then, and would continue to do so as I floated in and out of college). I felt the pressure to make my education “worth it” even more keenly than others.
Furthermore, the only books I have ever seen my mother read are her Weight Watchers™ Guidebook and some book about a library cat named Dewey- not necessarily bad choices, but I couldn’t explain to her how I had fallen in love with Neruda’s poetry before I had with any boy, or how Lovecraft’s slow dreadful clues egged me on page after page late into night, or how many tears I had shed over characters and plot lines and even simple phrases that were somehow just too right, how someone else had put into words what I couldn’t even correctly categorize into an emotion. And I wanted to learn how to do that.
But the next day I went ahead and chose what sounded like the most practical, economically sound major in the computer search box: accounting.
People love to hear you’re an accounting major, I think. And I know I loved to tell them. “Ooh, you must be so smart! Can you do my taxes?”
“There’s always a job for an accountant. They’re the ones who turn the lights off, you know.”
“You’re too smart for me. And once you graduate you’ll be too rich, too!” (That one was on a date.)
And when professors questioned and commented on my enthusiasm and skill for writing assignments and encouraged plans to pursue it, I just smiled, thanked them and reminded them that I was far too much of a busy accounting major to go down that road (I was a little smug, I’ll admit it.)
And yet here I am again.
Interdisciplinarity has a phrase from Aristotle (in reference to speculative knowledge, but I feel that works here) that describes the way I’ve come to see English: “there is a kind of education in which parents should have their sons trained not because it Is necessary, or useful, but simply because it is liberal and something good in itself.” I am good at accounting, and I appreciate its methodical processes and head-on challenges, but I’ve felt how the lack of room to create and imagine and ponder has cyclically depleted my motivation to do so- and the joy I gleaned from doing so. I don’t know if I will “use” my English education to make money (although I fully believe there are many opportunities to do so). But I know even right now the way I already look forward to the classes and the readings and the way it has jogged my motivation to learn more and create more makes it “worth it” to me. Reading, and writing, and thinking about the two makes me feel free and generally good. And after years of working multiple jobs and pursuing the “practical” education, I’ve learned that’s something that money can’t necessarily do. I feel like I should have a stronger argument when it comes to defending my passion for English, something more…. practical? economical? But since when did “it gives my life a purpose and makes me happy” become not good enough in itself?