Relevance

I was at a teacher workshop the other day, and the topic of student boredom came up. We were all trying to find ways to excite our students and to make our lessons more relevant to them.

What teacher hasn’t heard a student say, “this stuff is boring. When are we gonna learn something that’s actually relevant to our lives?”  Public and private school teachers, as well as pastors and Sunday school teachers, hear this quip often.

On the one hand, this desire for relevance touches upon a good point–far too often, we bore our students in education (whether in the church or in public education) with senseless drivel. The current obsession with standardized testing is a common example. Though accountability and measuring gains is a good thing, focusing on test taking skills and multiple choice exams is killing our kids’ enthrallment with learning.

But on the other hand, the quip misses something. For starters, our definition of relevance is skewed. We lean too much on “yankee pragmatism” and immediate gratification/application.

The prevailing attitude is that if its not immediately relevant or applicable, its bosh. But we miss that for some things, the pay off is later and isn’t immediately obvious.

This is an excerpt of a letter from a 17-year old C.S Lewis. It will blow your socks off:

You ask me how I spend my time, and though I am more interested in thoughts and feelings, we’ll come down to facts. I am awakened up in the morning by Kirk splashing in his bath, about 20 minutes after which I get up myself and come down. After breakfast & a short walk we start work on Thucydides a desperately dull and tedious Greek historian (I daresay tho’, you’d find him interesting) and on Homer whom I worship. After quarter of an hour’s rest we go on with Tacitus till lunch at 1.

I am then free till tea at 4.30: of course I am always anxious at this meal to see if Mrs K. is out, for Kirk never takes it. If she is I lounge in an arm chair with my book by the fire, reading over a leisurely and bountiful meal. If she’s in, or worse still has ’some people’ to tea, it means sitting on a right angled chair and sipping a meagre allowance of tea and making intelligent remarks about the war, the parish and the shortcomings of everyones servants. At 5, we do Plato and Horace, who are both charming, till supper at 7.30, after which comes German and French till about 9. Then I am free to go to bed whenever I like which is usually about 10.20.

I remind you: he was 17 when he wrote this!

According to our current definition of “relevance” his education was completely useless…but so much the worse for our skewed views of education. Obssessed with quickly “hooking” our students and congregants into our lessons, we bemoan: “ah, that stuff just isn’t relevant to us today! What does studying Homer and Greek have to do with life?”

Answer: plenty. Tackling hard things carves character into one’s soul. It makes one’s mind go deep. In addition, we often miss that works from men like Homer have survived the test of time because they touch upon universal themes. It might take some considerable digging, but one will find in the classics deep and rich commentary on the questions that have captured and vexed humans from the beginning.

Can’t we just realize that this stuff is just plain interesting, even if that interest takes a while to surface and even if you can’t “do anything” (i.e. make money or get a job) with it?

Boy we have missed the boat!

I daresay that the education displayed in this letter was and still is terribly relevant. Just because the payoff isn’t immediate and encased in flashing lights doesn’t mean its beneath us. Sometimes the biggest payoffs come after many years of plodding through tough, hard-to-chew-on-material that seems dull at the time. Lewis , due in part to the classical education he received as a youngster, led a full, wise, joyful, and yes, relevant life. That man “sucked the marrow” out of life. I can only dream of how interesting and invigorating it must have been to spend time with him.

I’m not suggesting that we all turn around tomorrow and drag our students through marathon readings of Tacitus or that we totally forget about exciting lessons. We need balance, and that calls for us to remember the shortcomings of our modern ways of thought.

We neglect the lessons of Lewis’ life to our kids’ peril.