I Am Human

For many years now, the number of students seeking a major in English has decreased substantially. Business Administration has experienced the complete opposite while the degree has actually become the most popular field of study as more than one in five American undergraduates will make it their concentration. Between the years of 1970 and 2004, the number of students majoring in the Humanities dropped from 30% to less than 16% while students majoring in Business increased from 14% to 22%.

I honestly didn’t feel attracted to Business Administration when I was graduating high school, but I decided to try to seek a degree in the field because I felt I’d be OK after graduating and I associated a degree in Business with just about any job title. I didn’t know about the economy, I had no clue what accounting was, and I would’ve never imagined how much legality went into the business world… but I believe in constructivism and the idea that “the development of my mind is viewed as a balance between what is known and what is currently being experienced” (Ke). So, I guess I imagined I’d develop admiration for the field.

That didn’t happen, though. I didn’t fit in with my colleagues and they weren’t really concerned with all of the conversations that I wanted to have. I wanted to talk about the world, why things were the way they were, who came up with this and who invented that. And that’s where the humanities shine through me. I have always appreciated being human, feeling words, and the idea of their being multiple answers to one question (and these are only some of the factors that are tied to the English degree at GGC).

So, when I finally decided to major in the humanities and once I began taking a few English courses, English at GGC became a way of understanding the world. Classrooms were small and plain “and the curriculum, both straightforward and challenging. What I read forced me to think about the words on the page, their meaning, their ethical and psychological implications, and what I could contrive to write about them. With the books in front of me, I was taught the skills of interpretation” (Chace).

When I finally decided to major in the humanities, English was a declaration that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future, rather learning about the world through reading and writing- learning to be human.

Sources:

Chace, William. "The Decline of the English Department: How It Happened and What Could Be Done to Reverse It." The American Scholar, vol. 78, no. 4, 2009, pp. 32-42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41222100.

Ke, LI. "Project-Based College English: An Approach to Teaching Non-English Majors." Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics (Bimonthly), vol. 33, no. 4, Aug. 2010, pp. 99-112., do: 10.1515/cjal.