What Is Meant When We Speak Of Making Education “Relevant?”
By
Allan C. Brownfeld
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Trustees at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia voted late in February to phase out majors in English, History, Philosophy, Mathematics, Theology and a number of other areas. The vote at this Catholic school was 26-0. In order to increase enrollment and revenue, the school decided to deliver degrees that many students and families perceive as more valuable in the job market.
Another university, St. Mary’s in Minnesota, announced in May that it is phasing out English, History, Theology and other undergraduate majors.
Students majoring in the abandoned subjects have expressed dismay. One student majoring in history at Marymount, Sophia Hernandez-Pina, 20, wrote to the Washington Post: “Without history we can just continue making the same mistakes others have made in that past rather than find new, innovating ways to be better. History is what has shaped the world we live in, good or bad…Everything has a history. Understanding that is understanding that it is not something you can eliminate.”
For many years, students throughout the country have been demanding that education be made “relevant.” They claim that the colleges and universities are far removed from the needs of society, that their four years of undergraduate learning is essentially cloistered unreality.
Yet the question of what is truly “relevant”——assuming we are not asking universities to be simply for job preparation——with regard to education is not quite so simple. Neither is the question of what kind of education best prepares students to cope with such practical problems as race relations, war, , climate change, poverty, immigration, and health care.
Addressing the graduating class at Amherst College in 1969, Dr. Kenneth Clark, the black psychologist and professor at the City College of New York, made an impassioned defense of what he termed “non-relevant” education. He called on colleges and universities to recognize the needs of those who did not seek immediate relevance in their studies—-students whom he called “the forgotten men of the present ferment of campus confrontation.”
“It is from these perverse lonely nonrelevant educated persons,” Clark stated, “that a practical society receives antidotes to a terrifying sense of inner emptiness and despair. From these impractical come our poets, our artists, our novelists, our satirists, our humorists, who, because of their perspective of education and their restless search for insights , continue to try to educate us. They make the life of the thinking human being more endurable and the thought of a future tolerable.”
What do students mean when they raise the question of relevance? Relevance to what? What they ought to mean, perhaps, is “relevant to wisdom,” though many think only of “relevant to current affairs” or “relevant to future employment.” None of this may be relevant to what we have traditionally called higher learning.
In his novel “Scott-King’s Modern Europe,” Evelyn Waugh’s hero learns by a summer’s experience of modern society that it would be infinitely wicked to teach young men to adjust to life in the modern world. Russell Kirk notes that “to adjust to the age of the mass state, of the concentration camp, the secret police, and injustice triumphant, would be sin and shame. The higher learning is not meant to inculcate conformity to passing fad and foible, nor necessarily to present domination and powers. It is intended, rather, to reveal to us the norms , the enduring standards, for the person and the republic. Adjustment to abnormality is a ruinous policy.”
Modern technology alters so rapidly that, as Peter Drucker has pointed out, the College and university cannot possibly keep abreast of industrial methods. What higher education should do is discipline the intellect so that it may be applied in future productive processes as to many other matters. The truly relevant things in higher education are the permanent things, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase. They are the body of knowledge not undone by the machinations of the modern world.
Is such an education “relevant?” Russell Kirk states that, “If a formal education does not bear at all upon our personal and social difficulties today, of course it is a sham and worthless…But no modern authors are more genuinely relevant than are Plato and Augustine today. Preoccupation with the passing pageant is merely the sort of ‘relevance’ which the big commercial book clubs sell; and college and university were not endowed for that purpose.”
Another basis for calling modern education “irrelevant” is that in many instances it has discouraged students from original thinking. Modern education has as its aim, Erich Fromm pointed out in Escape From Freedom, “…to teach the individual not to assert himself . Already, the boy in school must learn ‘to be silent’ not only when he is blamed justly but also has to learn, if necessary, to bear injustice in silence.” In Fromm’s view, “Another closely related way of discouraging original thinking is to regard all truth as relative. Truth is made out to be a metaphysical concept, and if anyone speaks about wanting to discover the truth, he is thought backward by the ‘progressive’ thinkers of our age. Truth is declared to be an entirely subjective matter of taste.”
Students are correct in being critical of much of the education they receive. Often social scientists have conceived of their function not as that of discovering truth and values, but simply of attempting to become “scientific.” Thus, political scientists are less likely to discuss the question of what is the best form of government and more likely to concern themselves with why people who earn $30,000 voted for or against a bond issue in their county. In their effort to discuss such practical problems, they become irrelevant to the future.
And it is because both young people and older ones lack the perspective which history and cultural continuity bring that events of the moment are often portrayed in an “end of the world” manner. Students protest, and their parents believe that all is lost. Neither group knows that we have seen much protest before. Neither group appreciates the fact that the technological revolution through which we are now going is analogous to the industrial Revolution and that we can learn something about ourselves by studying the experiences of those in the past who endured similar periods of history.
In many respects, the kind of education which best prepares young people for dealing with what appear to be earth-shaking problems of today——crime, violence, bigotry, unlimited immigration——is to understand the causes of such problems by studying history for, in a sense, we have seen most of this before, even if in different forms and circumstances and surroundings. As Santayana has said, those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat its mistakes. Education, to be relevant, should attempt to make us aware of the wisdom of the ages so that we may build upon it and not simply spend our own lives seeking things which have already been discovered.
Some years ago, in an informal survey of what students in the Los Angeles area knew about history, author Ben Stein was shocked to discover widespread ignorance of even relatively recent events. He wrote in Public Opinion:
“Recently, a 19-year-old junior at the University of Southern California sat with me while I watched ‘Guadalcanal Diary’ on t.v. It goes without saying that the child had never heard of Guadalcanal. More surprising, she did not know whom the U.S. was fighting against in the Pacific. (“The Germans?”) She was genuinely shocked to learn that all those people on that island were Japanese and that the U.S. had fought a war against them. (“who won?”). Another student at USC did not have any clear idea of when World War ll was fought…She also had no clear notion of what had begun the war for the U.S. Even more astounding, she was not sure which side Russia was on and whether Germany was on our side or against us. In fact, I have yet to find a single student in Los Angeles who could tell me the years when World War ll was fought. Not one could name all the presidents since World War ll.”
In 2015, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin issued his administration’s budget proposal which included a change to the mission of state universities. The “search for truth” would be cut in favor of a charge to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” Later, he called this “a drafting error.” But the change seems to be taking place. Consider the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. It has stopped offering such liberal arts majors as history, geography, geology, French and German.
Many today argue that the world has changed to such a degree that the truths enunciated in the past are no longer either applicable or valid to the 21st century. What this means, says Dr. Elton Trueblood, the distinguished Quaker philosopher, is “that we cut ourselves off from the wisdom of the ages, including that of the Bible. It means that if this is taken seriously we are really an orphan generation—-an orphan generation that takes itself far too seriously, that is too much impressed with changes that may be only superficial.And of course, if this is true of our generation, there is no reason why it will not be true of another generation. Therefore, whatever we gain would naturally be rejected by our descendants. No civilization is possible this way. Contemporaneity when it is a disease is a very damaging disease, because it destroys the continuity of culture.”
It is important that we make our institutions of higher education “relevant.” But the question remains: relevant to what? ##