The fall of English Literature

On the edges of the City of London, a couple of miles from where I grew up, there’s a very famous cemetery: Bunhill Fields. When I was growing up, it was pretty clear who the three most famous tombs belonged to: John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake.

However, I am not sure any of these men are the most famous inhabitant any more. Instead, I think it’s Thomas Bayes.

He was quite obscure in his lifetime. He was so obscure that we’re not even sure there is a correct picture of him. In the 1st edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, his father, a non-conformist preacher, featured, but he did not.

But today his most famous work is studied in universities around the world. His name has become an adjective (‘Bayesian’). He has had a profound influence on philosophy, medicine and technology. His most famous work is not a novel or a collection of poems or a devotional allegory but an algorithm that helps you to work out what to do when faced with uncertainty.

The prominence of Bayes and his theorem is illustrative of wider changes in education, and that wider change is that maths is in the ascendancy and the humanities, particularly literature, are in decline. Here is a striking graph from FFT proving this point.

This graph shows you the number of students taking maths A-level and the number taking English literature level. You can see that one graph goes from low to high and one goes from high to low. English literature and maths have basically replaced each other on the chart of most studied A-levels.

Why has this happened?

There are a lot of heated debates about whether the decline in English Literature is due to curriculum changes in England. I find this relatively implausible because the decline is happening in many other countries.

I think there are two more plausible reasons. One is the economy. Students are now much more focused on the return they are going to get from a degree, and they feel maths will give them a better financial return. 

The second reason is that reading is in decline. Half of British adults don’t read regularly, and 35 per cent say they are ‘lapsed readers’. Smartphones and social media have self-evidently changed the way we spend our time. If you are spending a couple of hours a day scrolling through various apps on your phone, that’s a couple of hours that are not available for reading. It’s also possible that they affect our ability to concentrate for long periods on time on text. Essentially, reading was a more popular leisure pastime in the past, and that probably ensured a steady pipeline of students for the humanities. That pipeline is no longer there.

So what should we do about this? I am a literature graduate, and these graphs concern me. But I do also have to acknowledge that the success of maths is an earned success. Sometimes, I think we humanities graduates can be a little mean about maths. We can say that it’s all just utilitarian, it’s all just students doing it for the sake of earning more money, isn’t that awful. I'd say three things in response to that. 

The first is that earning a decent living is not the sole aim of education, but it is not an unreasonable one. Younger students are faced with enormous economic headwinds. They are being asked to invest large sums of money in their education. There is nothing wrong with expecting a return on that investment.

Secondly, whatever your motivations and whatever job you want, maths is becoming increasingly not just useful but essential. It is getting harder and harder to avoid statistics, in particular. I speak from experience: I gave up maths at 16 and became an English teacher. I work for an assessment organisation and the bulk of what we do is assessing writing. Statistics are unavoidable, and I have had to go back and fill in some of those gaps. 

Third, maths isn’t just purely utilitarian. It has its own beauty and its own fascinating history. Bayes’s theorem is a triumph of civilisation that is up there with Defoe's novels, Bunyan’s devotionals and Blake’s poetry.

However, if we often neglect the beauty of maths, we can also be guilty of the opposite error: neglecting the utility of literature. I hear stories of smart, motivated and hard working graduates who turn up in prestigious graduate roles and say why do I need to read? Can’t I get everything I need from podcasts and videos? In a purely utilitarian sense, no. Podcasts and videos are less efficient methods of transmitting information. Just as a useful equation is also beautiful, a beautiful sentence is also useful in the way it can efficiently transmit information across time and space. This communication function of reading and writing is well understood.

But there is also another function of literacy which is equally important, but perhaps less well understood, which is the ability of literacy to extend thought. Even if you never write for an external audience, writing allows you to extend your own thoughts beyond the limitation of puny working memory. This is one the reasons literate societies are bigger and more complex than pre-literate societies. It is also a reason why we cannot rely on artificial intelligence to do the writing for us, because to outsource our writing is to outsource our thinking.  

What are the solutions to the decline of the humanities? It may well be that the old days, when students read extensively for pleasure, are gone. But there are then two possible responses. One is to go with the grain of the trends in society, and to replace the traditional lengthy texts with shorter extracts, more audio recordings, more video clips. The other response is to double down on the lengthy text. Embrace the new difficulty students have with reading, and overcome it. Position the humanities, and their difficult texts, as valuable because they are difficult.

And remember that students today are not lazy or demotivated or unwilling to work hard. They are not rejecting the humanities in favour of TikTok studies. They are rejecting the humanities in favour of subjects we traditionally think of as difficult: maths, physics, even further maths. They are willing to work hard at tricky subjects if they see the value. Clearly, they are not seeing the value in the humanities, or in persevering with reading. We have to show them that value: both the utility and the beauty. We can’t do that by compromising what is valuable.

Still, I am ultimately quite pessimistic about the future of the humanities, and particularly English Literature. Many of us have grown up in a world where literature was at the heart of the English story. Writers like Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare are national icons, recognisable by everyone. That may not be the case for much longer. The Times columnist James Marriott, himself a literature graduate, has done a great deal of reporting on this issue, and his articles make for sobering reading. His argument is that English Literature was in some ways the cultural underpinning of mid-century liberal democracy. The decline of English Literature and liberal democracy goes hand-in-hand. Combine this with the changes in technology and leisure habits, and it can be hard to see a way back for literature.

There is a possibility that literature becomes like some other aspects of our national history which were once central but are now marginal. The study of classics, for example, or the sport cricket, which are taught by fewer and fewer state schools. As a lover of literature, I would hate it if that became the case. But as a realist, I fear it may be likely.