Here’s a brief item about college English majors trying to read and comprehend Dickens. (Spoiler: they can’t.)
Here’s an example of what they were trying to read:
LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Many of the students — some of whom will go on to teach English literature themselves — couldn’t make sense of this passage at all.
Why has this happened? Why has the generational carrying-forward of the mind-stuff of civilization — an existential necessity — broken down so badly just in my own (admittedly longish) lifetime?
Also: is it possible that it hasn’t? While there may be an obvious decline, as our population has grown, in the percentage of people who can read and understand complex, metaphorical English prose, is it possible that the absolute number of them hasn’t declined at all? I don’t know.
7 Comments
I wish Tom Bertonneau were still with us in the Church Militant; he’d have a field day with this.
I never got into Dickens in high school; he seemed too open and easy (I disliked Joyce, too, for what it’s worth). But, reading this passage, I’m staggered at his genius. Shall have to dip into him again.
Lord have mercy. I clicked over to the linked article at Kitten’s site, and read a bit of the transcripts of these English majors words as they tried to interpret those paragraphs, and it is *so much worse* than I thought it could possibly be. These students might be quite intelligent, in raw terms, but they are simply dunces. They have no cultural knowledge. It’s terrifying. These are the sort who don’t quite know whether the Civil War or the Vietnam War came first, or who won them.
The public school system cannot die soon enough. You think you hate it sufficiently, but you don’t.
Kristor,
Obviously this is a terribly damning indictment of higher education, and a dispiriting decline; there can be no doubt that English majors of my generation wouldn’t have been like this. But, as I asked above, is it possible that this is in part due just to how many more people there are now, and how many more people go to college? Might there still in fact be, in absolute terms, just as many people who can comprehend Dickens in 2025 as there were in 1960?
I think you’re right Malcolm to caution about the percentage of those cognizant of the classics – it’s probably always been relatively small. Still, I suspect Americans in the past were more literate than they are today. The late historian Paul Johnson pointed out that “David Copperfield” was rated the best novel throughout the Twenties; during this period illiteracy went down from around 8 to 4 percent. Somebody like Harry Truman wasn’t unusual in performing Shakespeare’s plays with friends in Independence as a youth. One can come up with endless more examples as these.
I think part of the explanation may be the precipitous decline of the English major. I recall reading that the number of English majors has fallen very sharply, and that much the same thing has happened to history. English was once a serious major that required some ability in Anglo Saxon and Middle English, and that did not offer courses in contemporary light fiction. I don’t think I grossly exaggerate when I say it is now a refuge for emotionally unstable students who are not all that bright. There are high roads and low roads to a college degree, and English is now one of the lowest. You can’t really blame English professors for failing to uphold standards because higher standards would leave them with no students at all. English is by no means the only “soft” major, but “soft” majors exist because the actual demand for that major is very low, but the demand for low roads to a college degree is very high. Everything follows from that. Thus many English majors have little or no interest in English. I write this with the experience of a professor who taught a “soft” major to “majors” who had little or no interest in the “soft” subject in which they were majoring.
Malcolm writes “Obviously this is a terribly damning indictment of higher education, and a dispiriting decline; there can be no doubt that English majors of my generation wouldn’t have been like this.”
To which I respond “There can be no doubt that mathematics majors such as I in the late 1960s wouldn’t have been like this.”
Depressing.
Mike,
I’m sure you’re right.