The English Teacher and the Demand for "Relevance"

The English Teacher and the Demand for "Relevance"Author(s): Helen WhiteSource: Interpretations, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1971), pp. 36-42Published by: Scriptorium PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23239794 .

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The English Teacher and the Demand for "Relevance"

When a high school or college student presents the claim, not of

the ideal as in Ibsen's play The Wild Duck, but of "relevance," English teachers have a professional decision to make. They must decide

whether or not to honor the claim, but the decision should be made

only with due regard for the integrity of the English curriculum. This, like a regimen prescribed by a physician, may be good in the long run

for the student and for society whether or not the student likes it at the

moment.

As preparation for making decisions of this kind as they may

arise, I invite you to think through with me the several senses in which

the term "relevance" may be used. Only the ablest students, in my

experience of both high school and college teaching, use it in good

faith, in the sense of asking that literary works taught in the classroom

have a demonstrable bearing on their conscious needs, interests, and

feelings. A larger group, perhaps a majority of students, tends to raise

the issue uncritically without clear ideas as to what it means; this group raises the issue in more or less good faith. Generally, by "relevant" it

means "new," "fashionable," or something even vaguer. It may not

mean anything specific at all but use the term as a signal of its concep tion of itself as "with it—yuh know."

Some students, including some of the able but alienated ones, raise the issue, either consciously or unconsciously, in bad faith. They

may use or, I suppose I should say, abuse the term "relevance" merely as a means of subverting the curriculum. If one offers to change

according to their suggestions the literature being taught, they either

have none or make blatantly outrageous ones or, if they do have sug

gestions and one adopts these, they still find reasons not to "like" the

requirement that they study their own choices in good faith. Why? For

complex reasons, no doubt—they may have formed a distaste for any

thing bearing the name of "literature," and a deeper reason for this

distaste may be that literature requires study and discipline and these

are what they reject in English or any other field. Insofar as English

remains academically demanding, it is likely to be charged with "irrele

vance."

Analyzed in this way, the demand for relevance made in bad faith

can be seen to involve crude egoism. Students may use "relevant" as if

it meant whatever they capriciously choose to say they like. This false

usage of the term is, 1 have observed, not confined altogether to stu

dents; I suppose it will not be news that teachers sometimes teach what

they "like" without proper regard for the curriculum. Not that "liking" in a large sense is unimportant. One of the most generous and

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influential statements about fiction as a branch of one of the fine arts, "The Art of Fiction" by Henry James, contains this assertion:

"Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of

'liking' a work of art or not liking it: the most improved criticism will

not abolish that primitive, that ultimate test." But let us notice that

James characterizes liking as an ultimate test. He asked that the reader

know what was in a work before reacting. We cannot know till we have

read, as James asked, "with attention," that is, with attention to the

thing, the object.

My own formula is that description must precede analysis and

that both must precede even tentative judgment. 1 suggest, furthermore, that judgment of literary works had better remain tentative for quite some time. Else we may cheat ourselves and, what is worse, others.

Capricious liking and not liking on no basis except the crudely egoistic have in this realm as in any other their extensions into prejudice and

bigotry, and are often beyond rational discussion. When students de

mand relevance in bad faith, on the basis purely of what they declare

they like or do not like, I have often found that to argue the issue with

them head on is a losing game. The students who seriously raise the question of relevance may be

few, but what a teacher can say to them will underlie the handling of

the other sorts of students I have described-how explicit one gets being of course a matter of professional judgement. To the serious demand

for relevance, I think the adequate answer is that literature, by defini

tion, is relevant in a sense we have not yet examined, that of the

timeless as distinguished from the timely. Ezra Pound put the matter

this way in his useful little book the ABC of Reading'. "Literature is news that STAYS news." Pound also asserted, in his Spirit of Romance,

that "the history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures,

or mediocrity." He elaborated: "All ages are contemporaneous. . . .

This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren's

contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already

gathered into Abraham's bosom, or some more fitting receptacle."

By teaching and studying attested models of literary forms which

are not directly implicated in the passions of the hour, we gain not only

familiarity with masterwork but the ability to deal responsibly with

current publications. As lagniappe a student may also realize that there

is nothing new under the sun and gain a little of that perspective and

serenity which were once, at any rate, regarded as desirable effects of

the English curriculum. The teacher who sees this happy result even one

time will remember it forever as proof of a professional principle,

namely that we teach the work itself and, inextricably bound up with

it, a skill, a method of dealing with literature in general; accordingly, we

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choose the particular items which we teach with a view to their

usefulness in this regard. Otherwise we are teaching at random, and that means teaching

nothing. Random selection and random teaching determined by egoism and caprice or by uncritical response to the demand for the relevant

seem to me to loom as threats to the whole enterprise of English

teaching in both high school and college. I regret the rapid passing of

enthusiasm for what a few years ago Jerome Bruner named the "spiral"

curriculum, which applied to English meant wisely selected and

responsibly taught works, the simpler at the earlier levels, then around

again, always leading up, a little higher, a little wider, and so on, every

thing relevant in the root sense of the term.

Students who reach a point at which they are capable of making

intelligent demands in good faith for relevance usually become at the

same time capable of understanding that they may have to adjust to

what they are asked to study rather than the other way around. Of

course it is just in doing so that they become what we mean by "edu

cated" or "civilized," in English and every other field of study. In

English, we can feel that they have been brought to assess personal

limitations, set them aside, and transcend them through the apprecia tion of literature—and by now 1 don't imagine I have to tell you that by

"appreciation" 1 mean something stronger than capricious "liking."

They may even realize that their own time is not central, that it is

neither the best nor the worst of times, and begin to enjoy and profit

by the variety of human experience as expressed and preserved in litera

ture. One of the most relevant texts here is the Book of Ecclesiastes,

from which so many lasting works have drawn titles and substance.

In replying to legitimate demands for relevance, English teachers

could do worse than call attention to the dominance of the theme of

the timeless in the temporal in many of the major works of our own

century (leaving aside for the moment past ages). I am thinking particu

larly of some of the modern authors, master workmen all: Pound, Eliot,

Joyce, Proust. 1 am thinking of how English teachers may responsibly react to demands for relevance to the hottest issues of the time, such as

the conflict between generations and nihilism. Do you want a timeless

work on the conflict between generations: try Turgenev's Fathers and

Sons, publication date—1862. On revolutionaries?—try Dostoyevsky's

The Possessed, published in 1871. And so on.

I believe, however, that English teachers should not set them

selves to show students the value of merely modern themes in classic

works, as if only the modern had value. As a rule of thumb forjudging whether an English major is maturing, I often inquire into his attitude

toward periods and kinds of literature which differ from or contradict

current tastes and expectations. For American students, conditioned to

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democratic attitudes often interpreted as the license for self-indulgence, the literature of the eighteenth century is an excellent test. The cry of

"I like" or, more accurately, the cry of "I don't like,"—based on no

knowledge or on prejudice—gives away the continuing immaturity of

the student, as it gives away many an instructor likewise. The airy dismissal of whole eras, of the canons of great authors, often enough in

the service of the silly factionalism which pits the Renaissance against the Victorians or the eighteenth century against the moderns, is a

serious intellectual fault. As John Stuart Mill observed of attitudes

toward truth in another "age of change," the airy dismissal may be

indicative of "a propensity to split the truth and take half or less than

half of it," for he noted that many had "a habit of erecting their quills like a porcupine against anyone who brings them the other half, as if he

were attempting to deprive them of the portion they have."

However desirable it may be to bring the young to an apprecia tion of tradition, we know of course that it is natural for them to

exaggerate the value of the new. If their taste for the strange, the new,

the forbidden leads them into areas which may seem to us worse than

the landscape into which Browning's Childe Roland ventured, I see no

cause for great alarm. They are curious and should be. I was, and I

suppose you were. The last thing I would recommend is any sort of

censorship, any prohibiting, any moralizing expressions of horror.

Milton dealt with that long ago, and H. L. Mencken reminded us more

recently that no girl was ever ruined by a book.

In my opinion, one persuades students to temper their enthusi

asm for the new and for the pornographic (the charm of which seems to

be comprised largely of novelty) better by indirection than by

preaching—in short, by teaching literature. If any of you still needs

explicit argument on this point, however, plenty is available. It is a

revelation to all of us at some stage of our lives that the new is defin

able only by comparison with the old, really is inextricable from it,

and—as T.S. Eliot is famous for pointing out, though not for the first

time in the history of learning and criticism—whenever some new

literary work is written, it not only reflects the tradition in various

ways, in a sense it actually renews its predecessors or at least multiplies

the lights in which we can see older works. The network of relatedness

which makes tradition guarantees the relevance of the old, and means

that the new isn't as pristine as we may imagine. But I may be belaboring this question of the new more than

necessary, for the time may be near when students will begin to appre

ciate the English classroom just as a place of respite from the new. I am

thinking of the recently published book by Alvin Toffler called Future Shock in which the psychological and physical tolls of constantly accelerated change are described as a species of culture shock. Right

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now many of our commonest symptoms, from tension and headache to

cancer, are being attributed to mercury-contaminated fish from the

Tennessee River; but constant revolution in our technology, manners,

and morals, not to mention what we teach in the way of literature, will

do us in even if we survive our next catfish dinner.

Literature, properly selected and taught—a curriculum of literary

study protected from random change by our professional integrity—can be an important perservative against future shock. Both in content and

as an instance of the marvelous relevance of the old, a lecture delivered

in this country by Matthew Arnold in 1883 will illustrate my point. Stuart P. Sherman has summed up Arnold's main argument thus: "If

Arnold had said outright that the study of letters helps us to bear the

grand results of science, he would not have been guilty of a superficial

epigram; he would have spoken from the depths of his experience." Arnold's lecture, entitled "Literature and Science," contains frequent

repetitions of the very term we are concerned with, "relate"—as Arnold

phrases it, . .relating our knowledge to our sense for conduct and to

our sense for beauty." Now there, if anyone chooses to raise the issue

of relevance, might be a good place to begin. But I think we must still be concerned with the issue of relevance

presented in either good or bad faith as a demand for the new,

especially, as is often the case, when the relevant and the new are made

synonymous with the controversial. It is important for English teachers,

especially in public institutions, to realize that they are under no obliga tion whatever to teach the new, much less the controversial, which

obviously makes it difficult or impossible to discharge the professional

duty of teaching literature. The student who demands relevance in bad

faith in order to subvert the curriculum typically means by "relevant"

precisely the controversial, which by definition hasn't yet been proved relevant at all.

Professional responsibility rules out the teaching of materials

which cause an uproar. To begin with, that is a contradiction in terms.

Furthermore, we are never obliged to teach any given work. For every

one we have time to teach, there are hundreds which might have been

used instead. We can hope only to deal with representative works of

various eras and forms. Is anybody going to tell me that, if a novel is to

be selected for teaching, from all the novels ever written the only

possible choices are Couples, Portnoy's Complaint, and Myra Breckin

ridge? We do have, you know, alternatives to these on their own

grounds, their own themes. To the good student who seemed unduly

impressed by Couples, for example, I might suggest that for an enduring

treatment of marriage, adultery, and ruinous romanticism, he might try

Madame Bovary—for marriage and adultery, when he felt up to it in

40



magnitude and depth, I might point him to Anna Karenina. If he

seemed a trifle too personally interested in the complaint which Philip Roth has, at least temporarily, given Portnoy's name, I might—sticking to literary advice—send him to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man, in which the subject is handled with many other

complexities young men must deal with, but at a level of art which has

made it a classic for several decades now. And Myral Heaven knows;

depending on my patience at the time, I'd probably laugh, or, if pushed

by a sophisticated student, mention Petronius and parental consent.

Yes, I would mention parental consent. Public school teachers

and teachers of the basic college English courses should be reminded

that they are dealing with minors. The new and the controversial are

not, so far as the curriculum is concerned, the birthright of the young.

English teachers assuredly are not hired to teach the new and the con

troversial. It seems to me that teachers of English are exceeding their

province and avoiding their duties when they use class time to crusade

for any one new and controversial work or author, for any ideology, or

for riding any hobby horse in all directions. Their professional obliga tion is rather, if I may repeat myself, to teach literature in such a way that the items they teach are understood and appreciated both in them

selves and as standards by which students may begin to judge for them

selves the new and the controversial.

But let me descend from large declarations of professional in

tegrity and obligation; I know very well that many of us must face the

demand for relevance made in bad faith, and I know that it can be a

threat. As such it is in the realm of educational psychology and, in cases

where that cannot be applied, it becomes a disciplinary problem. Often

these days the demand made in bad faith seems to be entirely beyond the competence and the duty of the schools regarded as educational

institutions and certainly beyond any individual teacher. When students

riot and close a school or college demanding "relevance" in the form, for example, of trumped-up courses nominally devoted to some hot

social and political issue, we are beyond educational psychology and

discipline altogether. In extreme situations, the only advice I think it

realistic to give an English teacher is sauve qui peut. In less extreme but still touchy situations involving, say, an indi

vidual student who is rebellious and impertinent in the name of rele

vance, teachers can often prevent further trouble by recognizing the

bad faith and treating it for what it is. To answer with a rational

defense of the curriculum or to accede to the demand would be equally irrational. One has one's methods for bringing discussions around to

rational grounds. If this is possible, fine. If it is not, and one recognizes that it is not, one can at least cut the interview short or take other

measures which seem appropriate.

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The effective defense against demands for relevance made in bad

faith by students and also, incidentally, against attack from parents or

other adults who disapprove of what is taught—the true defense lies in

the soundness of the total curriculum, of its English component, and of

English teachers as sophisticated professionals. The only unanswerable

charge of irrelevance which can be made against English is possible when the selections taught are either intellectually or artistically in

ferior or when they are beyond the capacities of the students to whom

they are presented. If, as students move from grade to grade and on

into college, they encounter wisely chosen materials and teachers who

stick to the business of teaching them (not, that is, using literature as a

point of departure for an exercise of the ego and free association),

impertinent demands for relevance are not likely to emerge; and the

reasonable demands, made in good faith although perhaps naively or

mistakenly, become the greatest opportunities we ever have of teaching

English.

Helen White

Professor of English

Department of English

Memphis State University

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Documents

The English Teacher and the Demand for "Relevance"