Curtis prichard



The Purpose of Music EducationChanges in education today, such as the implementation of Common Core, are exerting pressure on all subjects that are part of the curriculum. The purpose of music education needs a clear definition, so that music programs are able to withstand the external forces pressing against it. Historically, the purpose has varied, but it has focused often on music reading (Mark & Gary, 2007, p. 227). The only agreed-upon premise seems to be that education is failing. In the presence of this tumultuous climate, music educators have an opportunity to reevaluate the goals and values that inform our educational practice, to help ensure our survival.In this paper, I will discuss three primary purposes of public school music education and how to achieve them. The purposes of music education are the following: to help students become more fully human, to give students a positive musical experience, and to perform music regularly. Of all the competing ideas concerning music in the schools, these three lie at the foundation of what music educators should strive to accomplish. These purposes are broad enough that differentiation of content to meet individual community and school needs is possible, while they are narrow enough that they should help define what excellent music education looks like. Developing humanityAt its most fundamental level, the overarching purpose of music education should be to help students develop their humanity. This goal should define every student’s interaction with music in the schools. The ability to play an instrument or to recognize a specific genre of plainchant becomes quite meaningless when stripped of its fully human context. Music educators must agree that making music in all its varied forms involves our most human faculties. Whether by rote or through careful intellectual study, humans make music all over the world.This philosophical underpinning echoes the call of Paulo Freire (1968), who argued that we must enable each other to pursue the vocation of becoming more fully human. Freire criticized the banking model of education, wherein the teacher as subject makes deposits into the students as objects; Freire would support my first purpose, because it is incompatible with the banking model. Developing humanity means that the teacher should take students’ opinions, their likes and dislikes, and their aspirations, into account when designing a specific curriculum. That music study should help students become more fully realized humans sounds obvious. Yet, some might worry that this goal is too broad, and that it is perhaps invalid because it cannot be measured. The latter claim rests at the heart of my philosophy of music education – we should not try to quantify the study of music. As Benedict argued (2007), music’s marginalization can actually be an advantage. From our position we have the unique opportunity to critique the prevailing system of education through clear statement of our priorities. If we try to align ourselves with the popular standardized testing and measuring of students, then we squander that opportunity. Instead, we should embrace the differences that music study offers. In embracing this difference teachers of other subjects can actually, as Hansen (2011) argued, come to understand us better. It is only through the recognition of difference that we truly come to know one another.The former claim, that this goal begins too broad, also addresses an important point. Standards, purposes, and goals should remain broad, particularly if they are to be enacted on a large scale. The need for broad standards exists because implementation of standards at a local level is only possible through differentiation and interpretation. Broad goals offer guidelines that are malleable and easily adapted to meet the needs of a particular community. Thus the first priority of a music program should be the development of students’ humanity, something that teachers and students can work together to achieve.Crafting positive musical experiencesOnce a music program is established, its directors must seek to provide students with a positive musical experience. Both adjectives, “positive” and “musical” are important, though for different reasons. It is helpful to have a working definition of “positive” before moving forward. A positive experience can be distinguished from a negative or neutral one by determining whether it leads to intellectual or moral growth. Dewey (1938) cautioned that not all experiences are equal in their educational value. He argued, “Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience” (p. 25). Educators must eschew these mis-educative experiences, which arrest development, at all costs. From this, we can see that the true reason for focusing on positive experience is to lead our students to want more growth through similarly good experiences. The other adjective, “musical”, should serve to hold music educators to task. Positive experiences are easy to design; positive experiences that are also musical, however, require a much better informed hand. A musical experience is one where students engage in the practice of music, either intellectually or through performance on an instrument or voice. Putting these together, having a positive musical experience means that students engage with music in a way that promotes intellectual growth, and as a result, the students will choose in the future to seek more opportunities for growth. Defining what constitutes engagement in music varies from place to place. The only way to ensure that students and teachers can ensure this aspect of music education happens is through working together to develop curriculum.In spite of this cooperation, it is here that Freire might contend I have not gone far enough into solidarity with the students. Freire (1968) considered teaching with the students to be a crucial departure from teaching for the students, a distinction that perhaps breaks down in the course of deciding which experiences promote growth and which do not. I will concede that for my second purpose to work, some authority must reside with the teacher. On that basis, Freire might say that my second purpose subverts my initial one – that the only way to become fully human is to be fully liberated from oppression. However, being fully liberated while also being a formal school student is a contradiction. Restrictions on freedom come from teachers, peers, and enjoyable activities; the purpose of the restrictions, however, is to promote growth, so that students will be able to enjoy greater freedoms in the future. There is also a largely pragmatic reason for emphasizing positive musical experiences. Only a small number of students will pursue music at a professional level, but they will be in positions to help or harm our programs. We want these students to look back with fondness on their time spent in music classes, and we want to find opportunities for them to pursue musical activities as adults, as well. Abril and Gault (2005) found correlations between past positive music experiences and the perceived value of music instruction in the schools. This underscores the importance of initiating the loop of positivity that I have described.Once out of school, however, former student musicians often face difficulties in continuing their craft. The problem with post-schooling is that our emphasis on ensemble performance leaves many would-be musicians without an option. Community bands and orchestras have worked to fill that gap in education, but there are many towns that do not have such groups. This leaves adults with few outlets for music, apart from treating it as another object to be consumed. If music educators have done a good job of crafting a positive experience and helping students to realize their humanity, then more community groups will be needed, as musically trained adults want to keep pursuing the activity. Music educators have a duty to assist in whatever way they can in these situations. It is our responsibility to ensure that there are activities for adults to engage with music in a meaningful way. Performing musicThe final purpose of any music program must be to perform music regularly. Music study cannot be solely intellectual. At some point, we must share our gifts, whether with our fellow musicians or with a true audience. Although music can be shared at any point in the learning process, respect for composers and the innate desire to better oneself should push musicians to refine the craft of music playing. In so doing, we teach our students not only how to express themselves in the clearest manner possible, but also the value of working hard to attain goals that perhaps seem out of reach initially.When we frame music education as the pursuit of greater humanness through positive experience, concerts can be one of the destinations in mind, but they do not need to be the only one. According to Dewey (1938), “Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into.” It is impossible to deprive an experience of its inherent force; all we can do is adjust the direction that the experience moves our students and us. If concerts move a majority of students in a negative direction – if pursuing performance goals actually arrests student development – then it is our duty as educators to reevaluate.This reconsideration, however, does not mean abandoning the idea of public performance altogether. Instead, we must work to control the variables that cause students to experience negativity from performances. Some of those factors might be a lack of self-confidence, tepid audience response, and fear of failure. The best way to counter these rests with the early performances – starting with elementary music students, performances should be approached as positive, relatively carefree events.High school music programs offer a unique perspective on this. For bands in particular, competitions often dominate the performing schedule; directors must work to balance the goal of competing with the curricular goals that ought to take precedence. For example, asking oneself, “Is this competition going to help my students become more fully human?” or “What kind of experience does going to this competition create for my students?” These questions are not easily answered, and the answers vary greatly from place to place. For example, in high achieving programs, competing may indeed be a positive experience, one of sharing the talents and hard work of the students with their peers and judges. However, in every competition there must be winners and losers. It is worth asking ourselves whether competing and losing is really better than not competing at all in terms of creating positive experiences. In short, music performances must be approached with the previous goals in mind. It takes diligent planning on the part of music educators to ensure that students will have positive experiences with performances. How do we achieve these?With such lofty goals, what methodology should teachers and administrators employ to achieve them? The first answer is one currently being employed in schools today: standards. I am not going to create a definitive list of standards here; instead, I want to address the idea of standards, and how to make them more agreeable. The idea of standards does not need to be considered inherently flawed, to be avoided at all costs. I define standards as agreed-upon minimum expectations that each student can meet. Of course, this definition raises several questions that I will try to address.Standards should exist to bring students and teachers to a given level of acceptability. Standards actually help to create freedom for music educators, because once the minimum has been met, student curiosity can be explored to its fullest. Even while trying to meet certain benchmarks, a high level of differentiation based on student need is possible. In other words, standards should not dictate content – that should be left to the teacher to decide, taking into consideration input from the students. This definition is antithetical to the ideas laid out by the National Association for Music Education (n.d.), which suggests that standards should be continually raised as they are met. Systematically raising standards as they are met prevents teachers and students from experiencing organic growth. It also makes the attainment of curricular freedom much more difficult, meaning that individuation of goals becomes almost impossible.This view of standards aligns most closely with Hansen’s (2007) insistence that his philosophy of cosmopolitanism be viewed as a framework rather than a strict set of criteria. Standards should be a guideline, a way of looking at the content of a course with a critical eye. While Hansen might critique standards because they narrow the focus too much, I have tried to compromise by making standards more malleable, thereby ensuring that they exist as a lens through which music education can be viewed in a variety of situations. Differentiation of standards is the only way they can exist in a positive manner. For that to happen, standards must be kept broad.Another aspect of standards is that a person or a group must agree upon them. The people who make this decision need enough credibility that the standards will be accepted, and this typically means music education and general education researchers. In order to make the standards reasonable for all students to achieve, research into cognitive abilities, as well as common sense in regards to skill-levels of all students, should be taken into account. Every effort should be made not to place an undue burden on teachers through overwrought standards.While standards can be a useful tool for music educators in the field, the primary venue for changing music education must start in colleges. Training music teachers who are both excellent musicians and apt educators is the best way to achieve the goals listed above. I attended a small music school in Tennessee for my bachelor’s degree, and many of my peers majored in music simply because they “liked band in high school.” While this may be a decent starting point, most of those students suffered from a severe lack of basic musical skills and literacy. I recall reacting with horror and indignation once in a second year music theory class when a colleague of mine, asked to spell an A7 chord in root position, started with B. Such examples highlight the need for strict standards in collegiate study of music. To be clear, these standards need not be nationwide or unilaterally enforced; however, if music aspires to be considered a serious subject worth scholarly pursuit, then permitting students to be passed along as a result of sheer inertia is unacceptable. Colleges are often not held accountable for the kind of graduates that are exiting their institutions. The result of this is that school districts near prominent music schools tend to have excellent teachers and outstanding music programs, while far-flung school districts languish with teachers who enjoy music but cannot teach it. College music programs place great importance on the performing aspects of music. It is undeniable that playing with ensembles and performing solo recitals should be an important part of any music education student’s collegiate career. The problem stems from overemphasizing these performances to the detriment of finding teaching opportunities. The initial experiences of pre-service teachers need to be similarly positive to the experiences that they will craft for their own music students. The best way to accomplish this is through guided teaching sessions that provide the opportunity to test theories in the real world of teaching.Another side effect of valuing performance so highly is that non-performance aspects of music are inevitably shortchanged. Activities like composition and listening and responding to music can help enhance study of instruments and create well-rounded students. Students who rarely have the experience of exploring music creatively develop a discomfort when trying to teach creativity to their own students. We can thus lock ourselves into a circular pattern, where schools magnify the importance of performance, whose students then go on to become teachers and also emphasize performance. ConclusionPurposes, standards, and goals can work together to ensure that students and teachers have the ability to meet minimal expectations. The purpose of music education should be kept broad to make it as flexible as possible. As music educators, we must bear in mind that a student’s first exposure to music comes rarely from any musician in the professional sense of the word, but from parents and from society at large. Music trickles into young ears from myriad sources – most of which are propagated through the medium of a small screen like a television or computer. The most preliminary task of any music educator is to understand how this informal learning of music shapes our students – before we ever have the chance to meet them. With this in mind, the purposes discussed here focus on fundamental characteristics, instead of trying to dictate to teachers what to teach and how to teach it. Benedict (2007) insisted that music educators cannot truly address the issues with which we are confronted without looking also at the systematic problems faced by education at large. It is worth noting that the purposes I set forth stand in opposition to much of modern public schooling in the United States. The inability of educators to assess such goals as positive musical experience and the realization of humanity provides a twofold example of why we should embrace our marginalized position, a viewpoint that Benedict (2007) discusses at length. We must resist the urge to jump into the mainstream of schooling through the objectification of music study. Music offers students a rare opportunity to escape the quantitative world into a place rich with meaning, emotion, and self-expression. Other subjects might provide chances to reach this, as well; however, those subjects are such a part of the regular curriculum that at this point teachers and students are unable to transcend the standardized tests into the realm of meaningful study. Often in our haste to join the full-fledged core curriculum, we neglect to emphasize the characteristics of music that brought us to it in the first place. By focusing on rediscovering our students’ humanity, manufacturing positive musical experiences, and having students sharing music through performance, we can return to the fundamental aspects that make music special. In so doing, we will be able to show non-musicians our values more clearly, which will ultimately promote understanding.Works CitedAbril, Carlos R., and Gault, Brent M. (2005). Elementary educators’ perceptions of elementary general music instructional goals. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 164. Retrieved from , Cathy. (2007). Naming our reality: Negotiating and creating meaning in the margin. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 1(15). Retrieved from , John. (1938). Experience & education. New York: Touchstone, 1997.Freire, P. (2000).?Pedagogy of the oppressed?(30th anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum.Hansen, David T. (2011). The teacher and the world: A study of cosmopolitanism as education. New York: Routledge, 2011.Mark, Michael, & Gary, Charles. (2007).?A history of American music education. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2007.National Association for Music Education. (n.d.). National standards for arts education: Introduction. Retrieved from musiced.files/2012/04/natlstndartsedintrolarge.pdf. ................
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