[karaterobot]

I wouldn't blame STEM. English departments did this to themselves when they bought into post-structuralism and postmodernism and so on, and in so doing tacitly assented to the proposition that they themselves could have nothing valuable to teach, because there wasn't any concrete truth to be had. After that, English just became a centrifuge where the core ideas lost cohesion, and everything flew outward to more and more distant, disconnected edges. There is no discipline of English to study at this point.

When I enrolled in 2000, I thought "well, I already know how to program, I can always get a job in software. Let's see what a liberal arts education can teach me," but even back then it was all about problematizing, casuistry, and twisted little factions of hateful goblins ruling over their tiny kingdoms. Nobody was teaching how to really read and comprehend a text, other than a couple of ancient Associate Professors who would never, ever make tenure. Nowadays, I'm sure that breed is nearly extinct, and I can't even imagine what's left. It could have just been my university, but nothing I've seen (including this article) makes me think that was an isolated case.

For the record, English has a ton of value in the software industry. Programming is easy enough, you can just learn that on your own. On the other hand, reading comprehension and critical thinking are incredibly rare in our industry, and they are differentiators. The problem for English departments is that they don't teach these very well anymore, and you'd be better off just learning them yourself as well.

[dimal]

I agree. I was an English major. Luckily, I had one teacher who taught us how to really read the base text and extract as much meaning from that as you could, without extrapolating at all. It turned out that there was an enormous amount of information that was latent in every text, once you knew how to analyze it. By this, I mean, from little details you could learn different characteristics of the narrator or setting, etc. Sentences that seemed like they were simply nice sentences actually were conveying very specific information that you could use to create a more vivid and accurate picture of the world that the text was creating.

I think this has turned out to be an incredibly useful skill for me, much more than any algorithm I’ve learned. I learned out to read deeply and consider my words very carefully when I write. Programmers are not really engineers. What we do is applied logic, yes, but ultimately we’re writers, and we’re readers. We write code and documentation, and we read code and documentation. Most programmers don’t consider their audience when they write. They just write for the computer. But the most important audience of your code is your team, who has to read it. I wish most engineers had the English class I did. I think it would help them immensely.

[lapcat]

This is a stretch. The article title says English, but there's a lot more to the humanities than just English. The article talks about how history for example has also dropped considerably.

[karaterobot]

I only studied English, and cannot speak to other branches of the humanities. My comment was pretty clearly about my own experience.

[lapcat]

You only studied some English, at one department, at one point in time in past, and then go on to claim, waving broadly, "There is no discipline of English to study at this point."