The Logic of Relevance in Independent School Education: A Pragmatic Critique

Abstract

I offer a pragmatic critique of the use of relevance in independent school education. I examine three meanings of relevance. I analyze the possible components of education which need to become relevant. And I give a critique of the call to make schools relevant through technology. I conclude that advice to make teaching relevant is ambiguous and stands on a shaky philosophical foundation. In place of the current calls for relevance in independent schools, the ideal of free inquiry should become the hallmark of relevance.1. IntroductionThe recent economic downturn has placed tuition driven-schools under increased pressure to retain students. Institutions of higher learning and independent secondary schools have both felt this strain. Unique to independent school marketing and pedagogy, however, is the increased impetus to make education relevant to the consumer, the families paying tuition at independent secondary schools.Several factors help insulate institutions of higher education from this immanent call for relevance. Since colleges and universities hire professors with doctoral degrees, and the training of these professors in doctoral programs takes place with highly professionalized disciplinarity, colleges and universities rarely make sweeping claims to their applicant pools about the way professors teach in order to attract applicants or to enroll those applicants admitted (Menand 2010, 87). Furthermore, professors with tenure have an increased amount of freedom in choosing to teach in a traditional or non-traditional manner or to teach what they consider canonical or to teach outside what the discipline deems canonical.1 Therefore, colleges and universities often make use of extra-pedagogical ways of attracting students. Attractive dorm rooms, recreational facilities, and other enhanced student services play significant roles in the marketing strategies of admissions departments.Independent secondary schools operate in a different environment than institutions of higher education, and many factors contribute to the increased drive for relevance and its distinctiveness to independent schools. In independent secondary schools, which pride themselves on teaching to the needs of individual students, and with faculty less protected by tenure from the demands of administrators, teachers are often asked to make their teaching relevant to the students. Such appeals to the need to make education relevant appear throughout a recent publication of Independent School, an issue dedicated to Teaching in a 2.0 World (2009). However, the authors employing this term do not give us a rigorous account of what relevance means. Therefore, this piece of advice has an odd ring to it, suggesting many things at once. The call for relevance implies that something in the traditional manner of teaching or of the traditional canon of each discipline is of itself not relevant. The advice proposes that we must transform the irrelevant into the relevant. Last, the suggestion insinuates that there is a present relevance to which we must conform our irrelevance.There is a lot to sort our here if we want to understand the logic of the use of the concept of relevance in education. We must determine the various meanings of the term relevance and gauge which meaning is proffered when it is used in educational literature. Only then can we give a critique of the logic and the philosophy of education supporting its use. Of particular interest is the relationship among method, content, skill, medium, and purpose in teaching. We must determine if the merely potentially relevant, which must be transformed into the actually relevant, is the material content we teach, the methods we use, the skills we teach, the medium through which we teach, or the goals of our teaching. That is, by compelling us to make what we teach relevant, which of the following is the teaching expert asking us to transform: ancient history and calculus, the choice of metaphor in explanation, essay writing and problem solving, outlining and working problems on the chalk, dry-erase, or smart board, or the functional consequences which ensue from the successful teaching of any of these? …