Progress in the Language Arts Dept

DRAFT

A friend once remarked that he was continually astonished at the low level of education these days. His latest concern was a conversation he had with a man who had graduated from a well known university, who, he discovered, had not the least knowledge of who Oscar Wilde was. It provoked in me some reflections, some of which I relayed to him.

The problem, as I see it, is not a diminution of academic standards, but a great expansion in the field of the language arts. In the 19th century, what we now call the language arts was a subset of a subset of philosophy, as was physics, mathematics and the rest of the so-called hard sciences. But shortly thereafter, in the apogee of civilization which was the 20th Century, the lqnguage arts began subsuming all other disciplines within itself, under the guise of what we now call 'lterary criticism.'

Now a literary critic is actually just an English major who has been induced to wander outside his natural boundaries, like a cow finding the gate open. As a result, you find literary critics gamboling in such widely dispersed fields as philosophy, New Testament studies, physics, biology, and others. Unfortunately, like that cow, the literary critic does not have much sustenance in these other fields, with the result being a rather thin and tasteless product.

But the bigger result of all of this is a collapse of standardization in the classic English studies. The field has become impossible because it encompasses everything. The most studious and rigorous attempt to gain an education in language arts today might never get to Oscar Wilde because there is simply not enough time.

Or to locate the problem more succintly, if something is about everything, then it is also about nothing.

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