Why Am I an English Major?

A friend of mine recently told me that she could tell I read a lot as a kid. Does that matter? I’ve wondered ever since. Does it have just as much bearing on me now as any other possibility—if I had grown up watching football, for instance, or if my parents were vegetarian and raised me not eating meat? I’ve since wondered exactly why it was that I read so much, and how much of that was the product of circumstance or, framed in another way, moral luck. Now that I’m an English major, the question has taken on new significance—why did I choose to stake part of my identity on what I read? It may be an oversimplification of the major, but is reading too narrow to form an academic discipline?

On Reading

Various influences, ranging from summer reading initiatives at local libraries to child literacy programs run through federal agencies, reward children who read. The National Literary Institute has a slogan on its website: “The ability to READ, WRITE, and COMMUNICATE connects people and empowers them to achieve things they never thought possible.” While bitter debates may rage about how kids should learn to read—phonics or the whole language approach—and what books should be available to them, there’s a bottom line, simple and uncontroversial: reading itself is good. To say it’s moral may be disputable, but reading is viewed as a key to success in one’s education and career, a method of self-improvement, and a tool of interpersonal connection.

I learned to read by the time I was four. Although my memory of overcoming the hurdle of silent consonants, unpredictable endings, and words that looked nothing like their meaning is fuzzy, I do vividly remember the pride I felt on sounding out the word “peacemakers” in a children’s book of verses. But why did I gravitate towards books when I could have chosen anything, from sports to video games? I could point to a host of external factors: my mother has a degree in literature, my grandmother is a literacy expert, and I had strict limits on my screen time. But—even from when I was too young to remember—my parents assure me there was another piece of the puzzle: I liked it. I was rewarded for it, but I also wanted it.

When I entered college, I struggled to choose a major. I had enough confidence in the institution of academia and enough financial support from my family to give me precious leeway—the option to pick something I thought I would enjoy rather than something purely practical. But I wrestled with an uneasy sense of guilt—how should I best make myself productive to society, and how could I pay back what I got unearned?—and so I interrogated every humanities degree that instinctively appealed to me. The professors I talked to understood my concerns. They had their eye on the numbers, on declining admissions, on metrics of “hireability” (even more so than I initially realized).

I understood that I liked reading and writing, and that by common understanding, an English major was a good fit, but I couldn’t justify it on that basis. Why (to paraphrase John Mulaney) pay thousands of dollars a year to be told to read a book available in the public domain, especially if I don’t actually read it? Unlike in grade school, where a love of reading dovetailed neatly with societal expectations (to get good grades and be a good student), I found myself confronting risk of criticism, financial uncertainty, and self-doubt if I actually majored in English. Even worse, there was no one except me on whose shoulders this choice, with all its fallout, would land. It didn’t help that I was interested in other fields, too, mostly within the realm of the humanities—history, classics, philosophy—and social sciences (mathematics and environmental science). Studying fiction, by comparison, felt undeniably silly.

Two years in, my view of my degree has matured, and I see with greater depth, even if not necessarily with more clarity. My experience has shifted me sometimes towards criticism and cynicism, and other times towards deeper enjoyment and commitment. I am still preoccupied by the question of what I owe, and whether my studies are “fake” compared to my friends in nursing school. I still worry about what I will do next. But while I don’t have a career guaranteed yet, my anxieties about whether the time I spend here is worthwhile have been calmed for two reasons.

What It’s All For

First, my perspective on education has changed. In the rat race of college admissions, I was fully persuaded by the idea that everything I did in school (and even outside that) was funneled towards obtaining a capital-E Experience: a neat story with a beginning, end, and quantifiable moral. I chastised myself for not taking more AP classes because of the brand value. I took classes to check off requirements, I did extracurriculars to make myself more “well-rounded” (a description I used with a level of enthusiasm corresponding to my lack of understanding of its true value), and I studied for the SAT so that I could go to school out of state. The ever-inaccessible, ever-demanding search for Experience was something that justified some part of my existence to someone else, ushering me into a market of exchange that commodified both me and the education I was buying. Jobs. Hobbies. Classes. Internships. More and more and more, all to prove that I was worth something.

Now, when I consider the value of education, I have in mind something closer to the psychological state of flow. When, on a Sunday afternoon, I finally put aside every impulse towards procrastination, bury myself in a classroom alone, turn off my music, and devote myself to a book and a pencil or a laptop, I find a work that is rewarding because it absorbs me. It takes effort to reach that state, but once I do, I know that I can understand the reading I have struggled with or write the essay that I have avoided. My classes in English and philosophy have facilitated that process more effectively than the smattering of other courses I have picked up. If I can read an 800-page book, I can concentrate enough to do other tasks I find daunting, no matter the sphere of life. Life requires concentration, in work, relationships, and even rest. An English degree certainly isn’t the only way to get there, but if I’ve found a good thing, why give it up?

I know the value of metrics, and I still seek validation in almost everything I do. But now, I have, dimly, a sense that there’s a better way to chart my progress, one that hinges on introspection. Maybe life isn’t just about crafting a story made up of Experiences, but about learning that is quiet, unproductive, circuitous, and indefinable. When I look back two years, I can identify this as a new insight.

Second, my interest in reading was both an end in itself and a gateway to other interests. Besides practice, there is one factor whose presence virtually guarantees concentration, and whose absence destroys it: desire. My parents may have reinforced the message that reading was good, and they may have provided us with all the tools we needed to read, but my identity-as-reader wasn’t guaranteed. I had friends with similar backgrounds who gravitated towards other hobbies. I loved stories, silly as they can be, and I still do, but no story exists in a vacuum, and I am increasingly attuned to the connection points between stories and reality.

Reading Middlemarch this summer, I was struck by how much of the book is devoted to town politics, and what that implies about George Eliot’s own interests and knowledge. A favorite poet of mine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, lived in an era of industrialization and was passionate about protecting nature; he devoted a poem to the felling of a row of poplar trees near him, and shortly after, the trees were replanted. Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics with a defense of politics, and he wants philosophy—viewed now, then, and perhaps always as fanciful and abstract—to improve people individually so that they can improve the city. The motivations that compel writing stem from politics, social reform, philosophy, and religion, and so stories can pull readers back towards the causes. I had long been told that these were things I should care about, but only recently, through college classes and reading ancient texts, have I begun to believe it.

I know that my study of books was never designed to hold me captive forever. If I spend all my life absorbed in texts and forget to look up, I have missed what those very authors cared most about. Even if I stay in teaching or academia, it is a tool to address deeper human problems. Ironically, while becoming suspicious of arguments that the value of my major is about job-readiness and social relevance, I have developed, in other ways, a deeper conviction of the instrumental value of an English major. In a class on constitutional law, I find myself thinking about how similar the work of Supreme Court Justices is to that of an English major—reading and analyzing texts (whether that be Jane Austen or the Constitution), interpreting authorial intent, and conducting arguments.

This essay is a testimonial, not a call to action. It was born of a long-standing personal need to justify to myself what I do—so maybe a selfish and self-perpetuating goal. But it will function, I hope, towards the same end as the data-tables consuming the thoughts of professors and college administrators, only more effectively. To answer the questions of “How many students are in the department? What are our retention rates? What makes students want to become English majors, and what makes them stay?” I can only offer my own story. And maybe for the humanities in particular, the problem is seeking satisfaction from data that mask the stories behind them.  

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