“A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.” – Edward Gibbon, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
The Roman Empire’s fall was detailed in 1776 through Edward Gibbon’s six-volume work, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” With over a million words, the magnum opus captured the tangled intricacy of Rome’s fall from the second to the 15th century.
Words. Numerous, powerful, and the foundation for everything in our lives—including dreaded English essays and textbooks—words are essential. Students have been taught the complexities of language and writing since the fifth century in ancient Rome. Yet, despite the impact words have and a millennium and a half-worth of teaching language arts, growing preferences for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) courses may be restructuring how current English classes are taught and perceived in schools.
At Brighton High School, the English Department is changing how sophomores can fulfill their English credit. With the introduction of AP Seminar as an English course option, the already small Honors American Literature program, an alternative to the sophomore-designated American Literature class, is nearly extinct. While on the surface this is a boost for AP English enrollment, it reflects an attempt from the administration to re-engage students in English Language Arts (ELA).
Now, more than ever, society demands that students be well-versed in all forms of the English language, yet students are opting for Advanced Placement (AP) courses in STEM subject areas rather than English, and with limited schedule space at BHS, students, under counselor advisement, prioritize AP classes in subjects they wish to focus on. As a result, the data surrounding AP class enrollment by department can be an indicator of student focus and interest.
“AP Science and Math have the most [AP enrollment], followed by AP History, followed by AP English,” Mr. Matt Evans, BHS’s lead principal, said.
Enrollment in AP English is the lowest of any AP subject in the school; this may be partly due to the fact that there are only two AP classes, AP English Language and Composition and AP English Literature and Composition. However, a trend that may explain this discrepancy is the practice of “stacking” AP classes to impress colleges and boost grade point averages (GPA), as APs are on a five-point scale rather than the traditional four-point scale. This leads many students, especially those already thinking about college applications, to trend towards picking AP classes that are often considered more fruitful than honors classes, which often consist of similar workloads without a GPA benefit.
It’s a risk versus reward issue. These students who opt for challenges want to be rewarded for it, and without a rewarding space in the English department, students tend to opt out of taking any advanced English class in their sophomore year. This has led to fewer sections of honors English classes being run every year.
“It feels unfair to the students who want to thrive in English,” junior Anna Giles, a former Honors American Literature student, said.
This has led the BHS administration to introduce a new 10th-grade AP English class: AP Seminar. Students want academic rigor, but they also want the measurable advantages from the work they put in.
“The numbers have gone down for Honors 10 because at that point, they do have more AP options, which is one reason we wanted to start AP Seminar and give a 10th-grade English AP option for our students,” Honors English 9 teacher Ms. Laura Awdish said.
Awdish pointed out that after freshman year, many students wish to go beyond their regular classes and choose more AP options. Currently, the AP courses available for sophomores lie entirely outside of the ELA domain, with most being history or STEM classes like AP Environmental Science and AP World History. The administration hopes to foster more interest in advanced English classes by offering a class that can boost their grades and provide them with college credit.
This attempt at reengagement is not just the response from the administration to the consistently low enrollment in Honors 10 and growing pressure on students to stack as many AP courses as possible but a reflection of a broader trend that is occurring across the country—students are progressively not picking classes based on their interests but rather their appearance on resumes.
“Students are looking for things that are going to make them marketable because college is getting more and more competitive and more expensive,” Evans said.
Perhaps it isn’t a disinterest in English but rather a greater interest in what colleges want from students. With the current significant focus placed on STEM from colleges and high schools alike, many see the perceived value of English classes as less than that of STEM; thus, as students increasingly select courses primarily based on their perceived value on college applications, some of these fundamental English courses may be sidelined.
In fact, the emphasis on STEM is greater than many realize. For example, the College Board’s annual report on AP Availability has three categories: schools with at least five AP courses, schools with at least 10 AP courses and schools with at least one AP STEM course. The inclusion of a specific benchmark for STEM AP availability highlights the priority placed on STEM access over ELA offerings.
There is also evidence of the STEM preference in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the number of humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded across American universities dropped by 24 percent between 2012 and 2022 to less than 10 percent of degrees, while the number of STEM degrees rose, now constituting nearly 40 percent of all bachelor’s degrees.
With the current priority focused on STEM throughout secondary and post-secondary schools, it may also stem from the difficulty of diversifying ELA offerings in the same way STEM courses can be expanded. As some, including Awdish and Evans, pointed out, it is less common for schools to offer a wider range of ELA classes because of the fact that it tends to be more challenging to diversify them in comparison to STEM classes.
“It’s because English is seen as sort of chunked into just… three or four definable categories: reading, writing, speaking and I think we could now include research,” Awdish said.
With this in mind, it could be pertinent to broaden the availability of high-level classes that include the full range of ELA, as sophomore Elizabeth Walters-Ricketts suggested.
“ELA classes should provide opportunities to merge lab write-ups and experimental results from our STEM courses into writing assignments,” Walters-Ricketts said.
Overall, the compounding forces of college application pressure, AP availability and benefits, as well as misplaced priorities and struggles to diversify, seem to be putting ELA courses in the background while keeping STEM in the forefront.
While there may not be one singular answer as to why ELA classes are increasingly put on the back burner, the fact that ELA is vitally important to people’s education, work and daily lives is undeniable.
“Ultimately, ELA is embedded in every part of STEM, but we need to change our perspective on it,” Walters-Ricketts said.
This isn’t about disinterest in English—it’s about incentives, structures and social attention. Nevertheless, this begs the question: Are schools and society experiencing the decline and fall of English and Language Arts or simply the consequence of how they choose to value it?
Will the decline of ELA soon be followed by the corruption of STEM literacy?
