"We should teach writing proportionally to its use cases. If business writing, blogging, research papers, and journalism dominate written content in the real world, why are we poring over the writing of the minority?"
This is another piece of the form "why don't they teach me taxes and cooking at school?". We teach literature in school because schools don't just exist to equip people with "skills" but with what we'd in Germany call Allgemeinbildung (sort of a comprehensive, cultural education), and the American system really built on this Humboldtian idea as well. (it underpins a lot of Western education, generally).
You don't go to school to learn how to get the most likes on Twitter with your blog, you go there to get a foundation and to be able to orient yourself in your history and culture. Many people also rarely need math or sports but they're part of a holistic education as a person.
Even the title question is I think just wrong. Americans can indeed write, just take a look at the amount of excellent American writers. I bet the majority of people writing articles like this were classically trained, it works. Ditching literary analysis for blogging advice is like top schools ditching Scheme to teach a React course, it shouldn't be celebrated, it's the bootcamps instead of Computer Science mentality, it eventually just erodes the educational foundation it is built on.
This is another piece of the form "why don't they teach me taxes and cooking at school?". We teach literature in school because schools don't just exist to equip people with "skills" but with what we'd in Germany call Allgemeinbildung (sort of a comprehensive, cultural education), and the American system really built on this Humboldtian idea as well. (it underpins a lot of Western education, generally).
You don't go to school to learn how to get the most likes on Twitter with your blog, you go there to get a foundation and to be able to orient yourself in your history and culture. Many people also rarely need math or sports but they're part of a holistic education as a person.
Even the title question is I think just wrong. Americans can indeed write, just take a look at the amount of excellent American writers. I bet the majority of people writing articles like this were classically trained, it works. Ditching literary analysis for blogging advice is like top schools ditching Scheme to teach a React course, it shouldn't be celebrated, it's the bootcamps instead of Computer Science mentality, it eventually just erodes the educational foundation it is built on.