On educational relevance and irrelevance

✍ Scribed by Kingsley Price

• Book ID: 104743244
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1974
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 791 KB
• Volume: 8
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0039-3746
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00367805

✦ Synopsis

In these days, everyone talks about education; and the consequent clamor of tongues is devoted, frequently, to the relevance and, even more frequently, to the irrelevance of some part or aspect of the subject. "The study of James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver is relevant, and the study of Homer and Shakespeare is irrelevant"; "the student's construction of his own examinations is relevant, and the teacher's construction of examinations is irrelevant"; "the student's participation in policy decisions is relevant, and his exclusion from such decisions is irrelevant"--these remarks typify a large part of the discourse of student reformer, journalist, politician, philosopher, and many another in that numerous band of persons newly designated by nature, if not by reflection, judgment, and experience, as thoroughgoing experts on education. In their remarks, the terms "relevance" and "irrelevance," together with their cognates, are used to put forward the legitimacy of new pictures of education and to remove legitimacy from those older pictures their users would replace.

But these terms, although familiar in some contexts, are