The fewer the number of people who know and respect the past, the easier it is to control people in the present. From J. Peder Zane at realclearwire.com:
Students of English and history are going the way of the dodo bird.
During just the last decade, their numbers at colleges and universities have dropped by a third – and humanities enrollment is down by 17%, Nathan Heller reports in his recent New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major.”
Data collected by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project show that “from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY-Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates â?? standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges â?? saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half.”
Conservatives who have long lamented the politicization of the humanities, highlighted by the rise of women’s studies, queer studies, ethnic studies as well as the transformation of English and history into tools for the left’s vision of social justice, might be tempted to cheer this development. They might also applaud a main driver Heller and others cite for this trend: the determination of students spooked by the 2008 economic meltdown to choose majors that can help them land decent paying jobs. Reading “Middlemarch” may be uplifting but a marketing degree pays dividends.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 