Steven Pearlstein: Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

Gabriel Conroy says:

I realize Pearlstein may not have much control over the title for his piece, but I’ll start my comment by saying we don’t really meet the parents his title suggests we will. We instead get his caricature of the parents.

Pearlstein at one point conflates two things. He’s conflating parents’ pressure on their children not to undertake majors in the humanities with the idea that majoring “choosing English or history as a major would doom them to lives as impecunious schoolteachers.” Maybe there’s a middle ground here. Maybe those parents have a mixture of motivations and not necessarily the extremely caricatured vision Pearlstein suggests.

Later, Pearlstein notes that humanities majors declined “modestly” over the last 30 years and precipitously since the great recession. Presumably that means there are a lot fewer humanities graduates now. Yet when discussing their unemployment rates in ca. 2012, he shows they’re comparable with (though, incidentally, still higher than) those of non-humanities majors. If the number of humanities majors increased precipitously, say, to the pre-great recession numbers, would those numbers be higher?

Pearlstein says

For me, there’s nothing more depressing than meeting incoming freshmen at Mason who have declared themselves as accounting majors. They’re 18 years old, they haven’t had a chance to take a course in Shakespeare or evolutionary biology or the history of economic thought, and already they’ve decided to devote the rest of their lives to accountancy. It’s worth remembering that at American universities, the original rationale for majors was not to train students for careers. Rather, the idea was that after a period of broad intellectual exploration, a major was supposed to give students the experience of mastering one subject, in the process developing skills such as discipline, persistence, and how to research, analyze, communicate clearly and think logically.

There’s an assumption here (based on the tenor of the rest of Pearlstein’s piece) that the incoming freshmen are all choosing “accountancy” because of pressure from their parents and not because they have decided for themselves it’s a good course of action. (Or perhaps it’s some combination of the two. The world is complicated.)

If an incoming freshman declares any major at all, it doesn’t strike me as particularly fair to claim they have therefore “decided to devote the rest of their lives to” that major People change majors. Or they don’t. If an incoming freshman chooses, say, “history,” are we to bemoan their decision “to devote the rest of their lives” to the study of history? Maybe Pearlstein would be happy if all incoming freshman entered with undeclared majors. That’s a strategy. But as I found out as an undergrad, it’s more time consuming to enter with an undeclared major, and then having to get all the official signatures to adopt a major, than it is to declare a major and stick with it. Maybe that’s not how it should be, but majors, even for the humanities, have required “prologue” and capstone course, other required courses, and pre-reqs and those need to be known and taken in time in order to graduate within four or five years.

And to the second part of Pearlstein’s paragraph. He seems to be assuming that the only way to develop “skills such as discipline, persistence, and how to research, analyze, communicate clearly and think logically” is to major in the humanities. I agree that studying the humanities and social sciences helps greatly (but is not sufficient and perhaps is not necessary to) cultivate those skills, but one needn’t major in those subjects to take those courses. Also–and I admit that Pearlstein doesn’t say this explicitly–there’s an undercurrent of “accountancy isn’t and cannot be a real discipline, isn’t intellectually rigorous.”

Pearlstein implies that it–parents’ pressuring children not to major in the humanities–is worse now than ever. He quotes a couple of people to that effect. He should not be so quick to say so. My anecdata aren’t data any more than Pearlstein’s anecdata are, but I recall, in the mid-1990s, knowing a lot of fellow undergrads whose parents put them under pressure not to major in humanities. I remember going to one of those “so you want to go to college” night meetings at my high school. A representative from one college criticized the phenomenon of someone majoring in engineering for his dad and in something else (let’s say, literature) for himself. That was 1991 or 1992.

All that said….Pearlstein is addressing a real problem. I’m a believer in the humanities. And despite my frequent invocations of “college isn’t for everybody” (an invocation I now retract and apologize for because I realize the inherent strawmannery of suggesting others believe college is for everybody), I believe the best way to promote the humanities is to rein in college costs and enable more people to attend. If it costs less to major in humanities, more people might take the risk. Those of us in the humanities should beware of the promises we make. The more pure one’s search for knowledge, the less one gets from mammon. (I posit that as a general rule, not an iron law, by the way). If we promise success in those fields that supposedly require demonstrated critical thinking, then we should at least provide the tools and advice to help get one’s foot in the door.Report