Students must learn how to get things wrong. Only one subject does that

Earlier this year, The New Yorker announced “the end of the English major”, sparking a furore across US college campuses and media outlets about whether studying English and other humanities subjects at university is still a viable path to success.

Detractors said the humanities were un-rigorous, lacked standards and led to rumination and not well-paying jobs. The defenders headed for high cultural ground: literature and the humanities immerse us in a rich, deep sense of what it means to be human.

Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. ‘Elizabeth and Darcy famously have to see they’re wrong about themselves and each other before they can fall in love.’Credit:

Not a bad defence, really. But it leaves unanswered the question of whether reading and writing, or — to quote the immortal prose of the HSC English syllabus — studying “texts and human experiences” can make us more successful. Yes! It definitely can.

I grew up in Sydney, and I’m living here presently, but for the past 20 years, I’ve been a professor in the English department at Princeton. Before that, I taught at Harvard. Based on that experience, I have a somewhat different take on why the humanities matter: Literature and other humanities subjects are important because they teach us how not to be right.

We all want to be right. The truth is that being right is often the easy part. Reading literature teaches us the value of getting things wrong. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Darcy famously have to see they’re wrong about themselves and each other before they can fall in love. When they finally get together, it’s not entirely for the reasons we’d like.

They have a sexy connection, sure, but the real turning point for Lizzy comes when she sees how big Mr Darcy’s house is. Their romance is fabulously intense, and also a bit calculating and worldly. The point is that it’s many things at the same time. Good readers will notice how we want to smooth everything out into a happy ending, and how the text doesn’t quite let us do that.

Literature is all about learning to work well with uncertainty and discomfort. Lolita seduces us into a place of sympathy with a malevolent madman; the Marabar Caves are the centre of A Passage to India – something bad happened, but we never know what; or those disappearances in Picnic at Hanging Rock, which are never explained. Novels matter most when they immerse us in ambiguous stories where we can’t get comfortable.

Heart of Darkness is about the vast, unspeakable “horror” of Africa after European colonisation (but we’re not explicitly told that), and the mysterious Kurtz dominates the novel but is barely seen or explained. Novels often rewrite other novels, poking fingers into the most uncomfortable parts of the original, like the South African novelist JM Coetzee’s Foe, a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe. There are books where we barely grasp what’s happening, like Finnegan’s Wake, or Tristram Shandy.

Well-taught, the humanities train us to develop a deep, rigorous attention that accepts uncertainty, ambiguity and discomfort as precious, not unwelcome. The question is always: What makes this text strange? You learn to pay attention to moments when your eye catches on the page or canvas or screen. You learn to stay close to difficulty. Training in subjects where the goal is not to get it right leads to more resilient success.

A scene from the movie adaptation of Lolita starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. The novel, by Vladimir Nabokov, seduces us into a place of sympathy with a malevolent madman.Credit:

Critical writing in the humanities calls for radical honesty in describing encounters with texts and artworks. We learn to push back, not accept at face value what a given document appears to be saying. Texts and works of art thrive on ideas that are contradictory and true at the same time. Being good at English involves relinquishing neat summaries and correct answers. It fights the headwind of cognitive bias.

Letting go of the longing to get the answer right teaches people not to cling to fixed ideas but to embrace uncertainty, and to prioritise being interesting over being safe. But learning how to be wrong is an acquired skill. It is not innate. Instinctively, we think we’re right, fixate on goals and outcomes, and repeat thought patterns that are safe but limiting.

It’s alluring to feel in control, especially of the future, which is the promise STEM disciplines often appear to offer. The language of STEM course descriptions focuses on making, shaping, designing, modelling, impacting, deciding, building, improving. Humanities courses tend to remind students of how little they can control, which ironically can seem to undermine their value – humanities course descriptions can come off as vague and inadequate. Reflecting; representing; interpreting; critiquing.

It’s time to rebrand reading and writing as skills for working with disorderly, contradictory points of view and colliding imaginative ideas. Good reading develops the equanimity and curiosity that comes when we loosen our grip on being right. Humanities success depends on embracing difficulty and doubt, and any successful person in any field will say there’s nothing more important than that.

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