Commentary: English vs. the World (of Degree Programs)

I was taking my daily perusal through CNN.com this morning and saw an article about why possible engineers are getting English degrees. Oh! Wonderful, maybe this will say how awesome English is!, I thought with childlike flights of fancy. My dreams quickly faded into the nether region where unrealized dreams go as I read through the entire five pages of the article. All in all, the article was about how people are dropping out of hard majors and switching to easier ones. That is correct, my friends, enemies, and friendemies, people are switching from the HARD degree programs and into the EASY ones.

Now, I am not going to downplay the sciences. It takes tremendous skill, willpower, and intelligence to make it through any of the sciences, maths, etc. When a person graduates with a degree in engineering, they should be proud that all the hard work they did will pay off. The problem I have is the assumption that English is not a hard degree to get. As a graduate of Buffalo State University with my B.A. in English Literature, I must humbly disagree with the "easy" label given to my major.

On the surface, you can see why people would say that English is not a hard major. You have no math, no sciences, no history, no physical requirements what-so-ever, and so on. While we aren't blasting out multi-line equations or creating medicines that will cure whatever the cast of the Jersey Shore is infected with, we are learning to be articulate, well read, researchers, and yes, scholars in the history of the world. How are you scholars in history, don't you just sit in the house and read books?! First, books require no power source, so we can take them *gasp* outside! Secondly, history is written as well as passed down orally or through artifacts. It takes a command of language, any language, to tell the tale of a people in a way that makes people think you know what you're talking about. Research needs to be done to study history, which includes diving through book after book. Thirdly, there is a little thing, very hard to know, since only those who have taken the test of one thousand swords can learn about... books have been written longer than any one person has been alive.

With the study of Literature, a student delves into history through those such as Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, William Beckford, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry Fielding, Miguel De Cervantes, and Ludovico Ariosto, just to name a few. We take in history at a personal level, where many of these writers have written with certain aspects of current (for them) society influencing them. History, life, and art blend in the words each puts to the page. Morality and ethics are explored, dissected, and reimagined. Take away literature from the history of man, just as if you took away mathematics, and the world would be drastically different. Engineering, Mathematics, the Sciences, English, Art, Music, and all the other degrees are needed in some aspect and no one is more important than the other. Before you rip apart another degree program as being less important than yours, take a moment and think before you speak. That is something I wish that the reporter from CNN.com did before publishing their article.