Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.
Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.
William M. Chace, ‘The Decline of the English Department’ , The American Scholar online
My stress, my experience. All very well for me, because I went on to teach it. But for all the others, while there’s no evidence that their degrees in English led to blasted lives, the traditional liberal writ had long ceased to run. English Departments at their height – as Chace points out, a height briefly occupied in the middle years of the 20th century - were preparing students for a world which no longer existed.
