Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why I’m relaxed about the decline of English at university 

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian about the study of English at university. It’s in decline, says Susannah Rustin, which is a shame. Bright youngsters who might once have signed up to a few years of sonnets and Chaucer are feeling pressured to study something more useful like engineering. Let them, and those influencing their choices, not suppose that English is self-indulgent thumb-twiddling; let them not forget that it sharpens the critical faculties, and ‘has a humanistic role… in advancing a more expansive and democratic version of Englishness than the nativist one.’

It happens that Susannah Rustin and I studied English together at York University in a previous century, so I’d like to resume an argument that I think I had with her back then, in the pages of a precocious little campus magazine. Yes, English is fun to study. But it’s a discipline that lacks discipline. And so I am more sanguine about its decline since the days of our teenage enthusiasm for it.

English used to be the queen of the humanities. At school it was what the brightest arty kids wanted to study – there was an air of Dead Poets Society, or Tobias Wolfe’s novel Old School (Dead Poets Society for grown-ups). When I went back to my old school a decade ago my old teacher was sad to report that this aura had faded: at A-level the boys were being nudged in more practical and lucrative directions by their blue-chip parents. I agree there’s something sad about that, but on the other hand its stock was overvalued (to echo the lingo of those parents) and a correction was in order.

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Theo Hobson
Written by
Theo Hobson
Theo Hobson is the author of seven books, including God Created Humanism: the Christian Basis of Secular Values

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