[BingoAhoy]

Stephen King was an English major. Word art, literature, helps people advance cognitively.

English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated.

Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.

[ryan93]

What kind of argument is that. For every 10,000 English majors there is maybe 1 Stephen king or anything close to ti

[beepbooptheory]

I think it's a quite good argument, and at very least one that doesn't rely on colleges literally producing a larger number Stephen Kings, as if something about the quantity produced could matter at all (really curious how you even arrived at that counter).

[ryan93]

It’s not a good argument. Zero good writers learned it in college.

[tomrod]

If one did, do you realize your argument fails?

http://airshipdaily.com/blog/05232014-authors-teachers

[ryan93]

No. All learned to write by sitting down by themselves and writing.

[beepbooptheory]

Regardless, creative writing is but a subset of the discipline of English, if not an entirely separate department in a lot of schools. Most of it is studying what has already been written, making connections and forming articulations that understand our human world.

If you see the study of any humanities at all as only possibly measured by what success you gain in the domains of social status or notoriety, then I wonder if you apply that same rubric to STEM fields? Please be mindful that just because you dont know about something, doesn't make it dumb, bad, or pointless. At the very least, don't wave away so simply an entire discipline!