A couple of years ago UCLA blew up its English major. Students used to have to know Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. Now, they can make do with race, ethnicity, sex, “postcolonial” and other non-disciplines. A degree like that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, much less the extortionate tuition universities charge today.
English majors have given way to “Queer Theory,” whatever anarchy that is.
We studied Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton in public high school. We also read Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and had to recite portions of it from memory, we read Jack London and many others I can scarcely recall, we studied the poetry of Lord Byron and others. We probably studied more classic literature than would be required for a master’s these days.
I never imagined when I finished high school that I would live to see young people who had finished college with a major in history yet knew less than I did about history. I certainly never imagined that I would live to see supposedly educated people using terms like “fifty thousand times smaller” or “three hundred percent less”, my grade school teachers would have been certain that I had lost my mind if I had been heard using such absurd terms.
My seventh grade teacher used to tell the class that one day a person would need a high school diploma to sweep the floor. Of course she thought that would be because everyone would have much more education so naturally only those with college degrees would be able to get a job worth having. She never would have imagined that the real reason would be that a high school graduate would have less actual education than a fourth grader had in her day.