“We learned more from a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school.”
-Bruce Springsteen,
“No Surrender”

It’s tempting to write at length about the truth of Springsteen’s lyric, about how music cuts to the heart in a way that academia simply cannot. The condensed wisdom, emotion and passion of a great rock ‘n’ roll tune can rival anything by Shakespeare, Joyce or Salinger.

I learned more about love and heartache from listening to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds than I did from reading 18th century British poets. I learned more about practical communism from the songs of Billy Bragg than I did from reading Marx and Engels. Those three-minute records are capsules of life, keeping the listener forever young and spiritually attune to a higher plane–a more pure order.

Of course, I don’t really think that one could be intellectually sustained by a steady diet of rock ‘n’ roll. How could music critics come up with crap like “post-punk Dylanisms” and “Spartan lo-fi esthetics” without a few 300-level English courses? But as my final semester approaches, the question persists: Why, exactly, am I in school?

As an English major, this has been a nagging question, asked both internally and externally with semi-regularity. Sure, I love literature; I even get excited arguing my theses in term papers on things like religious symbolism and colonial stereotypes. If I believe my professors, English is one of the most flexible majors around.

After all, every company needs to have someone who can string a few sentences together. But will my knowledge of the medieval social strata in The Canterbury Tales aid me when I’m writing the instruction manual for an electric toothbrush?

Of course everyone suggests that I become a teacher, a sort of auto-response that most people unwittingly emit when they hear the words “English” and “major” side by side. And while I have nothing but respect for the teaching profession, I’m rather suspect at the number of disciplines that seem to yield a great number of teachers. Are professors in English, theology and history only in the business to create more English, theology and history teachers? It sounds like a racket, though I’m not sure who benefits from this endless cycle of liberal arts educators.

So maybe I’ll heed Springsteen’s advice and study my record collection. Perhaps amid the Motown, folk and punk my future awaits in circular, shiny tea leaves waiting to be divined. I just fear that the needle will drop on Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World:”

“Don’t know much about history,

Don’t know much biology.

Don’t know much about a science book,

Don’t know much about the French I took.”