"[They say] It's not relevant."

"Not relevant! Not relevant?" I was almost yelling. "'The Barring of the Door'!"

"What?"

My view (from some distance) is that many teachers (and, for that matter, administrators) lack sufficient education themselves to be able to judge what is relevant. Educationists continue to put a great deal of emphasis on methodology, neglecting substantive subject matter. One of the many subjects being neglected is history. At least, that's the impression I get from my students, who know little about anything that happened before they were born and not much about anything that happened more than a few years ago. A few don't know much about what is happening now because they don't read newspapers or even Internet news sites. They are too busy chatting and downloading the latest hit songs.

"Relevance" cannot be judged accurately without the perspective of history. Furthermore, one must have the ability to think broadly in terms of connected ideas to find relevance. Ideas in the past become relevant to the present when we view them in this broader perspective.

Our culture, too, is rapidly approaching a point where we think that only the newest of the new is worth our attention. If it's from the past, it's irrelevant. That seems to apply as much to ideas as it does to physical things. The lessons of history? Irrelevant. The history of other cultures? Irrelevant. The origins of the world's religions? Irrelevant. Literature written more than a few decades ago? Irrelevant. Art and music created less recently than the last decade or two? Outdated and irrelevant. Thus, we educate children to believe that all that matters is here and now.

One of the goals of education should be to give a broad perspective. For that, a knowledge of the past is not just relevant; it is essential.