One Way to Freedom Through Relevancy

By Clevis O. Laverty

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everyone concerned with it, teachers and taught.
Henry Adams

Antoine de St. Exupery said, “There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something” and “Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance.” Centuries before, Francis Bacon said, “It is a pleasure, to stand upon a shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure, to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle, and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage point of truth, and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests in the vale below.”

There is a connection between the ideas of these two very different philosophers. To make education relevant for the young, we must make them aware of “the meaning of thirst;” we must make them aware of the areas of life about which they can be thirsty. In some way, we have to lead them or show them how they can find their way to the shore and the castle window. And then when they have seen the panorama of sea-tossed ships and the adventure below and have become excited about becoming involved in some part of that vision, we must in some way make relevant a hierarchy of goals which stand between them and the attainment of that vision. The understanding and preparation of written and oral composition properly and effectively presented to the students within the English curriculum is one way of releasing the young person from the prison of a frustrating inability to comprehend what he is experiencing and to communicate without distortion what he does comprehend to someone else.

Relevancy is the key that opens the door to an awareness that a thirst exists. Consciously or unconsciously, the student is saying, “What does all this have to do with me? Antony gave a speech to a bunch of Romans. What for? So I could memorize it?” The little black boy in the ghetto leafs through his brand new literature book; it doesn’t seem to do very much for him. Another student from a well-to-do suburb finds himself involved in an academic game about economics in which the students assume roles: the one who makes the most money wins. Like Benjamin in The Graduate, this student has already learned that the affluent life does not necessarily make the good life. In each of these situations the barrier to learning is relevancy: the student is unable to see any connection between him and what is being presented to him. “Teaching must be connected with the student’s background, drives and life if any learning is to take place. . . . The obvious and sensible thing to do is to replace the irrelevant with the relevant through changing the content.

Our own perception of history leads us to believe that the problem is not a new one, nor is it only recently recognized. Montaigne took issue with pedants with a vitriolic commentary that has a familiar modern ring: “. . . considering the way in which we are instructed, it is no wonder that neither scholars nor masters become more able. . . . the care and outlay of our fathers aim only at furnishing our heads with learning: concerning good judgment and virtue, there is little thought. . . We labour only to fill the memory, and we leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Just as birds go at times in quest of grain and carry it in their beaks without tasting it, to feed it to their little ones, so our pedants go about picking up learning from books and take it only in their tongues, simply to void it and make parade of it.” Montaigne is affirming that a subject cannot be connected to the life of the student if the instructor has not connected it to life himself. He comments further on this lack of connection between the subject matter and the interests of the student: “They are always bawling into our ears as if pouring into a tunnel; and our business is simply to repeat what they tell us.” Montaigne, too, feels the student’s need for self expression and the need for being r recognized as a person having ideas worthy of attention: “I would not have him (the teacher) alone think and speak: I would have him listen while his pupil takes his turn at speaking.” And again he comes back to the need for relevancy: “Let him (the teacher) not demand an account of the words of the lesson simply, but of its meaning and substance; and let him judge of the benefit that he has derived by the evidence, not of his memory, but of his life.”

Another sixteenth century educator, Richard Mulcaster, posed a few revolutionary ideas and questions concerning relevancy in education. He might have asked the question, “Is education keeping itself apart from the affairs of the world, or is it identifying itself with the realities of everyday living?” Modern educators believe they have formulated some brilliant new idea when they speak of student involvement and of a primary concern for the child. Mulcaster “held . . . that in education our first concern must be the child, and what he undertakes to learn should be brought into harmony with his capacities. He felt that in the process of learning, the use of the senses can be of enormous help. Finally, he supported the view that learning can and ought to be a high delight.” To answer the hypothetical question that Mulcaster might have asked, the educator must “demonstrate” to the student a relevancy in the subjects being taught. If this relevancy is not found, the student stands in two dissassoc8ated worlds: the school classroom and life as it is lived. Teachers of various disciplines complain that the student does not show that he has learned to use his native language. The student may very well have learned to use his native language, but he sees no connection between using it in the English classroom and using it in the science classroom.

Although Herbart was standing solidly on his doctrine of apperception, the need for relevance as a prerequisite for learning is set forth in his “Formal Steps.” First the student is prepared for a new idea or topic by a review of previous knowledge and experience which lead up to the new material. Then the new material is presented and explained for the student to consider. The new material is then compared or contrasted with something old and familiar in the preparation, and relevancy begins as the student associates it with something already in his background. Next he forms a generalization from a synthesis of the old and the new, and then to complete the process of achieving relevancy, the generalization is put to work with an appropriate problem. Again the student must become personally involved with the learning in order for it to become meaningful to him. When it becomes meaningful, the student will see its usefulness; when he discovers its usefulness, he will use it.

Although one may not go along with all of Dewey’s philosophy, John Dewey subscribes to the necessity for relevance. Simply stated he says that education is actual living by converting the school into an institution that includes all phases of the community. The child’s education, the subject matter, does become relevant when he can “see” how it pertains to the various segments of the community which lie in his experience or with which he can identify.

Speaking to the point from a different philosophical background, Alfred North Whitehead seems to have a practical approach when he speaks about education needing reform. He says that we should do what we can to facilitate learning but make sure the learning remains in it: “The broad primrose path leads to a nasty place.” He makes a point, too, when he reminds us that “a merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.” Inert ideas are useless: the child should make the ideas and experiences his own and experience the joy of discovery. When we have succeeded in bringing the child to this realization, the course of study becomes his personal property, and he has been freed from the shackles of dull and meaningless pedantry.

The individuals who have just been mentioned have not been paraded through this article to lend authority to the article for their expertise; familiar names have been used to show that the search for relevance has been a motivation for many educators who have a variety of philosophies and who did not share the same chronological period. This article does not propose that the inclusion of the teaching of composition in the English curriculum is the panacea for all the ills of education but rather that its inclusion is one way in which the student can make some sense of the educational process, one tool that he can use effectively in all his classes, in his home, and in his community. In the hands of the prepared teacher, composition becomes a “high delight” to the student as he slowly releases himself from the inability to express himself.

Teaching composition goes far beyond just teaching students to write. Too many students have been taught to hate writing; so there has to be a preparation. Properly conceived, the teaching of composition involves the development of student sensitivity to the physical world, the world of human relations, and the inner mental world in which every human being does much of his living. It includes developing in students patterns of productive thought, both rational and emotional, for varying purposes. Composition teaching includes developing a morality of language and language usage, so that in all aspects of communication, students will show a respect for language as the fabric connecting people together.

Composition is putting things together for a purpose. Much more is involved than thesis statement, topic sentence, body, and summarizing statement. Before anyone starts to compose, he has a purpose which he clarifies and verbalizes to make it clear in his own mind. He will be encouraged to compose in terms of an audience. He will find that there is a better chance of achieving his purpose if he considers the members of that audience carefully and adapts his message to them. The result will be two fold: he will communicate more effectively, and he will become aware of other people and their reactions. A whole new world will lie before him as his understanding of other people increases. It is important for the student to understand that he is not writing for the teacher, and correspondingly the teacher must de-emphasize his own tendencies to corrective red-ink activities and pay more attention to discovering whether or not the student is achieving his own purpose.

This article makes no attempt to cover the broad spectrum of literary composition but merely intends through a few illustrations to answer the questions already raised. The illustrations include the learning of the purpose and structure of a process paper, the development of a problem-solving paper, and the use of comparison and contrast as effective means of communication. In all of these areas, the student selects his own topics within the framework of a method or approach. His audience will be his contemporaries, but he may ask his contemporaries to imaging they are a different type of audience. His contemporaries will decide whether or not the student has made his thesis clear. In this way each student’s criticisms and suggestions will become meaningful and necessary. He becomes a person with something to contribute, a person having ideas worthy of attention.

The process paper, which includes how to do something or how to put something together, will bring forth a variety of topics from “How We Put One Over on the Principal” to “How to Put a Bicycle Together.” Before a single word is written, considerable discussion takes place in the classroom. Their imaginations are exercised as they tear apart good and poor models of the process papers that have been given to them. In the discussion, they discover that everyone is frequently involved in telling someone else how something was accomplished or how to do something. The subject matter, composition, takes on a new character as they relive all the experiences they have had in which people have had trouble in getting an ideal expressed. Composition is no longer confined within the walls of a schoolhouse; it has gone out into the world where people make their living and have fun.

By approaching the problem-solving paper through reflective thinking, which brings out the recall and use of earlier learnings, the student learns the value of something previously learned. The previous learning is no longer in isolation; it becomes useful. Through preparatory discussion, he discovers that life is full of problems and that they are in every area of his experience. He discovers, too, that there is a rational approach to problem solving which is not merely an exercise in his English classroom. He finds out that although this approach will not solve all problems, it will facilitate the identification of the problem and thereby make it easier to deal with. He learns to bring the problem into broad daylight, see it in context, apply a variety of solutions to it, analyze the solutions, and determine which solution or combination of solutions is a fitting line of action. This is relevant: he has problems in other classes; he has problems at home, and his parents have problems. It even becomes a “high delight” to be able to fasten onto a clearcut problem that previously had been only a vague uncomfortable feeling. The black boy takes another look at that literature book through which he has been leafing. Through an examination of his ideas of what his problem is, he just might come up with the idea that the book has no relevancy for him because there are no black people in it. Brought out into the open, this problem might find a solution. Perhaps the affluent student may get it across to the teacher that the goal of the game is the problem and that perhaps an adjustment of values is needed.

Composing is the process of bringing elements into an order, of forming relationships. Experiencing and learning, too, are relating processes. One of the major ways of relating items is noting their likeness or difference by comparison and contrast. Comparison and contrast enable the student to generalize, to classify, and to define. Through comparison and contrast he can communicate attitude or emotion; his use of his senses helps him to share that experience. He finds that his ability to solve problems and successfully meet new situations requires seeing likenesses of and differences between new problems and problems previously solved, between new situations and situations previously experienced. Experiences are not isolated; school subjects are not separated from one another. Every experience is seen in the light of other experiences. The difference between the way Antony spoke to the crowd and the way Brutus spoke to the crowd takes on new meaning when it is compared to the way two opposing speakers try to control public opinion at a town meeting. A similarity is seen between the mindlessness of the Roman mob and a relatively recent Chicago mob that lent notoriety to a certain convention. The problems in one subject can be attacked in much the same way as the problems in another subject.

In the final analysis, however, the student finds relevancy in the education to which he is subjected only insofar as the teacher has found it before him and then has been concerned enough to lead the student to the castle window, the shore, and the vantage point of truth, realizing that the student must find the place upon which to stand that has meaning for him and that he must see and recognize the panorama of “errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests in the vale below” as it corresponds to his own experience and imagination. Perhaps the teacher, while he is in the process of solving his own problem of how to build an education that will fit the student for the type of world the student will find himself in, will help the student when he leads him to understand the world he is going to find is filled with problems. Then the teacher and students can work together in discovering specific problems, in learning to recognize them, in approaching them, and in finding solutions. Hopefully, the student will discover the meaning of thirst and the relevancy of mastering a hierarchy of skills to reach a desired skill.

"Most of us believe that all American boys and girls should have experiences, at least in the elementary and secondary schools, that are maximally meaningful to them at the time, and that their judgments are necessary if we are to know what is meaningful." Stephen M. Corey, Teachers College, Columbia University