The Irrelevance of "Relevance"

Knowledge has for some time been relegated in American schooling to the practical.  Dewey focused on homely skills and the abstractions derived from cooking, art, woodworking, and assorted other practical activities.  In the 1970s, after I graduated from college (the University of Minnesota), the watchword in pedagogy was “relevance,” meaning relevance to students’ experience and interests.  Taking child-centered instruction as far as it could go, students’ desires dictated what was taught and how.  Teachers ceded their expertise and experience to the whims of teenagers.  So much for "active learning."

I’ve been thinking of these things as I read Marilynne Robinson’s essay, “When I Was Young I Read Books.” Early she writes, “Relevance was not an issue for me.  I looked to Galilee for meaning and Spokane for othodonture.”

She describes her novel Housekeeping

 

as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood.  It was my intention to make only those allusions that would have been available to my narrator, Ruth, if she were me at her age, more or less.  The classical allusions, Carthage sown with salt and the sowing of dragon’s teeth which sprouted into armed men, stories that Ruthie combines, were both in the textbook we used at Cœur d’Alene High School…”

That feels so long ago, yet my high school in Westerville, Ohio offered Latin, though I took Spanish because it was supposed to be easier.

Robinson’s quiet tribute to her high school’s approach to reading holds a lesson we can draw from.  To limit a student to reading what is “relevant” to her is presumptuous.  We should instead encourage her to read anything and everything, as Robinson herself did.  Only by exposure to a wide variety of subjects and genres will she develop her own sense of what is “relevant.” I thought that was what "active learning" was supposed to encourage.  Then again, Dewey himself urged reading instruction be postponed to third grade or later.

We also avoid the distortion of what knowledge is for—understanding not only ourselves, but also the world and people around us, neither of which may obviously “apply” to our lives as we understand them now.  “Relevance” reinforces our cultural narcissism, and we should be helping young people reject that intellectual straitjacket, not embrace it.