What is English? I find myself thinking back on the constant questioning of my peers throughout my university career. "What are you going to do with that?" they would ask me when I proudly announced that I was studying English as a major. Unfortunately for them, I was never . . . never at a loss for words. I would try to explain to them that English is not something that exists somewhere out there in the atmosphere, or only in the classroom where some stuffy old guy is trying his best to teach poetry and the like. "But what good will it do you?" they would ask, sitting behind their expensive textbooks for business and economics. Their problem, I have decided, was not complete ignorance, it was a simple case of not knowing what English really is.

All too often, English, as a discipline, is represented in the way mentioned above - it seems to have no relevance to people in their everyday lives (ironically enough, even to those who are avid readers). My answer to their lack of knowledge is that English is not a thing - it is everything. Look around - yes you! Even right now, wherever you are. What do you see? Do you see posters, signs, books, a computer? Perhaps you can hear music or a television? My point here is that unless you have somehow gotten yourself into a complete vacuum, you are surrounded by texts. English, as a discipline, teaches students how to read those texts - how to read, interpret, analyze, understand and reflect upon everything around us. That is, as a discipline, English has to do with the mental and moral training of our entire culture (and all other cultures - even those who have not developed written language).

The aim of English therefore, is not to have students memorize sonnets or quotations, or to be able to identify the direct object of a sentence, but to navigate through a world of texts. It makes no difference that an engineer (I am not lumping people here, but extending my example from above) cannot define a villanelle; what does matter is that he can read, write, represent, speak, listen and view everything around him without becoming lost in a sea of misunderstanding. Even the act of watching a movie, which most people love to do, is English (or founded therein). I have watched movies with people who have walked away saying: "It was a good movie, but I knew what was going to happen around half way through." -- What is English . . . ha! How do those people think they developed the cognitive power to predict the ending? Do they think that they somehow magically intuited it from the atmosphere? Without knowing it, and without thinking about all of the years they spent in the English classroom, they have used their internalized understanding of metaphor, foreshadowing, irony, etc. to make an educated prediction (much, much more than a guess).

English, like sentence, is very difficult to define. As a student of philosophy, I know the danger involved in claiming knowledge about concepts - and that is what English is: a concept. Concepts are by their very nature definable only in terms of their representations in the world - just as we cannot truly define Justice, but only cite instances where justice has been served, the same goes for English. I cannot define English, but I can (and I have, with the example of the movie watchers) cite instances of it as it emerges in everyday life - and emerge it does. Therefore, what makes English a unique discipline from the standpoint of secondary school (in University, we find subjects/disciplines like philosophy, folklore, etc.) is that it is a concept. Science, physics, mathematics, etc., all of these can be defined (i.e. ahem . . . physics is the study of matter and energy and the interactions of matter and energy - Mr. Kingston would be proud), whereas English is by its nature indefinable.