TESOL/Linguistics: The Blind Leading the Blind

Have I mentioned recently that linguistics is the final degeneration of human progress? The lowest form of education possible? It's upsetting that it is so wildly popular: everyone wants to learn English. So they get a bunch of white people and train them in linguistics and TESOL, because there is an assumption (which I disagree with) that learning a lot of little symbols about all the various forms of mistakes non-native speakers can make and studying students not-yet-perfect accent will somehow get them to learn how to speak English well. It's absolutely ridiculous.
1) It's teacher-centered rather than student centered
2) It focuses on the mistakes and gives them power as autonomous modes of communication
3) It produces English teachers who know everything about the linguistic production of English but nothing of any value

Universities like to hire MA's or PHD's in linguistics to teach English to their students. This is a severely flawed notion. While linguistics or TESOL might be helpful to native-speaking ESL teachers, it is emphatically not helpful, nor useful, to any non-native student's wanting to learn how to speak English. Rather than read great English literature, study English grammar, or improve their fluency, they learn linguistics and do linguistic studies of their own "Meta-Language" (read: bad pronunciation).

There are thousands of these students, all over the world, studying Linguistics and TESOL simply because, the MA's and PhD's studied Linguistics and TESOL. They don't know anything else. So what you get is whole countries of academics studying the linguistic composition of a foreign language, their non-native English. And yet often their speaking and writing is terrible. And they will go on to teach "English" to others - by teaching linguistics and TESOL.

It almost makes me furious. It's so futile and self-defeating and inane and bureaucratic, absolutely senseless in every way. Brilliant minds solving problems that DO NOT NEED to be solved.

People have been learning languages since we began speaking them. People CAN learn 2 or 3 languages, and learn them well. They did it long before there was ever such a thing as TESOL or Linguistics. Without a doubt, my students studying Literature will learn to use English, not to dissect it and ruin it. And yet, I see myself having trouble finding work because the emphasis is so much on linguistics rather than literature.