In extolling the virtues of an English degree, novelist Mark Haddon was preaching to the converted as far as I'm concerned - I wouldn't have wanted to studied anything else, and nothing's changed two decades on. But evidently others need to be urgently persuaded of its worth, given worrying news of a dramatic drop in applications.
The fundamental problem, suggests David Duff, chair of the English Association, is the government's aggressive promotion of STEM subjects at the expense of the humanities, and in doing so "fostering this reductive narrative that you can measure the value of education with a calculator".
Humanities courses like English are vital for (among other things) teaching the ability to process information, to reflect and evaluate, and to structure, construct and clearly communicate an argument. And as Dame Marina Warner suggests in the article, in an era of duplicitous rhetoric and fake news, the skills of critical analysis learned on such courses have never been more important.
But, to be frank, the Tories would no doubt be delighted with a docile population happy to unquestioningly swallow their horseshit. And as author Patrick Gale points out, it's the government themselves who are most in need of the benefits of such an education: "If more members of the current cabinet had English literature degrees, you can be sure they wouldn't be cutting our overseas aid budget or so radically undervaluing the importance of investing in children whose education has been disrupted by the pandemic."
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