THE NEW YORKER/Adam Gopnik:About a year ago, I wrote about some attempts to explain why anyone would, or ought to, study English in college.The point, I thought, was not that studying English gives anyone some practical advantage on non-English majors, but that it enables us to enter, as equals, into a long existing, ongoing conversation. It isn’t productive in a tangible sense; it’s productive in a human sense. The action, whether rewarded or not, really is its own reward. The activity is the answer.It might be worth asking similar questions about the value of studying, or at least, reading, history these days, since it is a subject that comes to mind many mornings on the op-ed page. Every writer, of every political flavor, has some neat historical analogy, or mini-lesson, with which to preface an argument for why we ought to bomb these guys or side with those guys against the guys we were bombing before. newyorker/news/daily-comment/help-know-history
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 15:56:47 +0000
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