Transforming Music Education

Preface

Preface Many music teachers have passed through my classrooms, and I have talked with many more in this country and abroad about their lives and work. Making sense of my own experience, the stories I have heard other teachers tell, and the educational writers whose work I have read is a tall order . In my first days as a teacher I was eager to succeed in an educational system I took for granted. I attributed my unease about what I saw, heard, and felt to my inexperience as a teacher and musician. As evidence to the contrary mounted inexorably over the years, I began to wish to speak in my own voice, subvert the status quo, and reconstruct the system. Finding a space to be truly heard among the host of others in music education , powerful and well-connected policy makers—men and women who control the rostrums and publications where one can speak or write with freedom—has been one of the major challenges of my life. Many of my students are happy, contented musicians and teachers, pleased with how things are in general education. They believe that they can make important contributions to education and are eager to move on to the studios, colleges, schools, and religious places in which they have chosen to teach. They see the status quo as an imperative and are reluctant to consider the notion that music education may be in need of transformation . Critical of the spate of national reports berating schools and education systems, they rise to the defense of how things are and the efforts of earnest and hardworking teachers who are doing their best in the interests of their pupils. Such students are sometimes impatient with others for whom the educational journey has been less pleasant and who are critical of the way things are. The problem with the dissatisfied ones lies, they say, with a lack of being able to adjust to the system and not with the system itself. I am pleased to learn from these students and to know that they have had such happy and fulfilling experiences as students and teachers. And I am encouraged by their hopefulness and devotion. Others are not so happy. I meet many refugees from the classroom, disenchanted with the lack of liberty they possess as teachers, beset by the host of directives that impede their work, angered by the paternalistic attitudes of those administrators who wield power over them and fail to appreciate their efforts. There are those who are very lonely. In the words of one teacher, “I feel like an island in the midst of an ocean.” Overworked and underpaid, she is very much alone with little support for her work, little time to spend with her colleagues, and still less to spend with her family. There are those who are afraid. Some express fear for their lives with armed guards patrolling their school corridors, threatened in their classes by disrespectful , angry, violent, and uncouth students or by anonymous threats via PX017A-6628F_FM 18/10/02 11:45 Page ix e-mail, telephone, or the Internet. Some are afraid that they do not know all they should know. Others fear that what they know and value is no longer relevant in a world that is changing dramatically. And still others fear that their influence no longer really counts in a society where mass media operatives, talk show hosts, entertainers, and Internet advertisers are the most potent purveyors of public knowledge. As one experienced teacher put it, “I feel like a pebble on the shore when the tide has gone out.” Her fear of jeopardizing her teaching position, losing the livelihood upon which her family depends, and alienating the authority figures in her work life keeps her silent. Some confess, “I no longer enjoy teaching children”; “I no longer enjoy music.” Gone are the hope, joy, and love of connecting with students or of the art that led them to teaching in the first place. In their place I hear the voices of weariness, discouragement, and ennui. Over the years I have sometimes been embarrassed by the ways education is regarded, studied, and practiced. Despite the fact that teachers face some of the most urgent and important challenges in society, the field draws relatively few intellectuals, lovers of wisdom, or outstanding practitioners of their particular specialties. Instead of attracting the best and brightest students, education often interests those who cannot get into other fields. In the university at...