What Are English Classes For?
Less and More Than You Think
Like many (most?) on Substack, I fall pretty easily into the category of aspiring prose writers who feel/have felt rejected by and disillusioned with Big Literature.1 I entered undergrad as a political science student (God forgive me), but quickly realized that I was mostly interested in the literature, and not so much in game theory or studies that claim to measure the quantity of democracy in a given country, so I went where the literature was supposed to be: the English department.
The first sign of trouble came in my meeting with my new advisor, who seemed concerned that I had, as an English student, signed up only for English courses, rather than just one or two with a heaping helping of basket-weaving electives. “That’s a lot of reading and writing…” she warned, which is to this day one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard. I asked whether many students in the English department disliked reading and writing, to which she chuckled, asked if I was really sure, and then checked the box and waved me through.
I went on to develop some vague and uninformed designs on going to work for a magazine or a publisher or something, but after a few years of reading little of worth in class and constant eulogies for the prose writing industry outside of it, I essentially lost interest in school and washed out. There are a few reasons for this, not least of which are my own shortcomings of character. I’m sure that if I had a better work ethic or temperament, if I was wiser or smarter, I would have done my homework and finished my degree, but I did have some legitimate beefs.
My university’s2 English department seemed to be oriented around the idea that advanced study in English need not include much actual study of the discipline itself; only a minority of my graduation requirements specified coursework in the English department, with everything else mostly being about accumulating a set amount of credit hours of any kind instead of learning anything to do with English literature in particular. Even the courses within my major seemed averse to (or at least not especially concerned with) training expert practitioners of language. Consider these standouts:
A class on environmentalist literature where nobody had any interest in discussing romanticism or transcendentalism, preferring instead to look at photographs of dead albatrosses with plastic in their stomachs or structureless poetry imagining what it feels like to be a tree. In fairness, we did read one novel.3
A seminar called “Writing Education Technologies,” targeted toward aspiring English teachers, in which we were discouraged from thinking in terms of improving students’ writing skills. Our biggest assignment was to “create a map of our personal literary journey,” and the only substantial text we were asked to produce was an author’s note about this project.
A course in which the professor required the use of a form-fillable boilerplate paragraph for all of our routine writing assignments. This constituted an “advanced composition” credit.
A professor in a grammar (also known as “the rules of language”) class insisted that there are no real rules for language4. When asked if the ESL students he used to teach received the same instruction, and whether it helped them to speak English, he got testy and ended the discussion.
It will probably seem like I’m saying these are "woke" professors, like they think semicolons are racist and reading anything published before 2008 should be a prosecutable offence, or something, so I want to be emphatic: this was not the issue, and is actually much closer to the opposite of my complaint!
While I’m sure that these particular professors have voted Democrat down the ballot for every election in my lifetime, they did not seem to have any particular agenda with their classes, and that is a problem! Their classrooms were so profoundly lacking intention that it wasn’t clear whether we were meant to actually gain anything at all, never mind improving our mastery of English in particular. We were always “developing” or “investigating”, but never producing or determining.
It became clear that nobody had any concrete or articulable ideas about what English students are meant to accomplish during their four years of study. A more industrious and moral person probably would have seen this as the perfect opportunity to bend the department’s resources to their own purpose, but to me it just felt like the university taking money for nothing. I signed up for classes with the expectation that I would be instructed in the study and use of the discipline.
I figured English literature was "about" truth or beauty or what have you, the kinds of ur-ideas to which all other ideas seem to be implicitly leading, and that my classes would embody this kind of (re)search and questioning. If my view was too narrow or uninformed or otherwise misguided, I assumed I would be corrected and set on a better or more expansive path. In short, I expected to be educated. What I experienced instead was some limp gesturing toward a perspective that literature and ideas are not really "about" or "for" anything; the stance of the English department seemed to be that English is about having fun and being yourself, and nothing more concrete or serious could be said about it.
Between semesters, I told my neighbor - an LDS5 man who supported his wife and five children by his accounting practice - that I had changed my major to English. He seemed disappointed and thought it a waste of time, which you know to expect when you confess an interest in liberal arts to the gainfully employed.6
What I wasn’t prepared for was the actual content of his response, which was: “Don’t you already speak that?” He meant it as a joke, of course, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more correct the joke seems. We’re used to thinking of English and foreign language classes as having different purposes. Usually when we think of English class, we assume we’re going to be studying important literature, by which we mean, reading famous books, whereas other language classes are generally thought of to be more focused on grammatical competence - the ability to read and write and speak correctly.
I think these are really the same thing, and we just start in different places. English classes are very different for less sophisticated students in grade and middle school; younger children who are less advanced in their English education spend time drilling basic reading comprehension, grammar, and syntax, just the same as any high school junior taking Spanish or French might.
In either case, the course is meant to refine the sophistication and complexity with which a student can interpret and employ the language. It’s really the same function that we get from any other subject; chemistry classes are for teaching students the principles of chemistry and, usually, some manner of how to apply them. Ditto physics or calculus or computer science; it’s just what education is.
Maybe this answer is so broad that it’s become circular - “English classes are for teaching English” is maybe less than insightful - but I think it actually sharpens the whole issue into a very simple imperative: English class is for making students better at using and understanding English.
What exactly constitutes “better” is, I think, a trap. While it sounds like the kind of thing we ought to try and define for the benefit of teachers (if not just on principle), trying to do so with any kind of precision is more likely to produce a semantic doom-loop than a satisfying answer. I’m comfortable echoing Sherlock’s epistemic confidence by declaring that “I know what is good when I see it.” I should hope that anyone empowered to write about a subject, much less teach it, would feel the same.
“Establishment” and “traditional” make this infrastructure seem too staid and stable when it really does change a lot. Still, there clearly exists something like a cartel, some group of entities that has outsized control over which words hit the shelves in bookstands/stores, so why not treat it like oil or tobacco - call ‘em Big! This more easily includes groups like university departments and fellowships that are also critical gatekeepers but are perhaps less visible than NYT.
Granted I went to my state’s big flagship university - it’s possible, perhaps even probable, I’d have had a very different experience at a more focused liberal arts institution.
If you’ve ever wished Chinatown’s hero was a journalist who gets sexually assaulted instead of a P.I. who gets his nose broken, and that it had the same setting as Fallout: New Vegas (but without all the nuclear war or Roman stuff), and also that it was written by the generic-brand version of James Patterson, then you will love The Water Knife.
In hopes of warding off your personal take on descriptivism, here is mine, which supersedes all others: Yes, the way people use specific words or sentence structures is always changing, and new terms or new formulations of existing ones are constantly emerging, but we obviously can still articulate some ideas about how those changes occur and what limitations there are on the kinds of changes that can happen. For example, it doesn’t seem likely that English speakers will ever start using the word “superintendent” to describe the feeling of biting a potato chip, and a grammarian ought to be able to explain why this is so, precisely because their expertise is in these rules. To say that the rules don’t exist is almost certainly less accurate (and definitely less helpful) than saying they are canonical.
“Mormon” for the uninitiated, though they disprefer the term. I haven’t discussed it at length with my neighbors, but after reading up a bit on the etymology, it seems like a rough equivalent to calling people “Quraniacs” or “Mohamed heads” instead of Muslims.
Pursuing an English degree usually means your professional aspirations fall into one of two camps: either you want to be a teacher, which makes you a sucker, or you want to be "a very special boy who thinks important thoughts," which makes you a pretentious sucker.