Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice

6. Music Education as an Occasion for Intelligence

Music Education as an Occasion for Intelligence Putting Philosophy into Practice 6 In previous chapters, I explained how music education should be reconceived as a study in social intelligence in which consideration is given not just to the pursuit of musical knowledge and skills but also to inculcating in children and music education majors moral imagination and those kinds of personal skills, dispositions, virtues, and attributes needed to mindfully engage in public criticism of musical values. Music education is in the profoundest sense a search for personal integrity and identity. The word “identity” of late is usually treated as synonymous with ethnicity, gender, or nationalism. These are obviously aspects of identity, but as used here the construction of identity has more to do with the cultivation of moral character than with this or that music or group. Individuals must associate with and commit to various groups as means of “finding themselves” and making sense of musical and educational experience. This, however, should not be at the expense of independence of mind and moral and ethical judgment and responsibility.1 Music teachers and music teacher educators wishing to instill liberal values in their students will first need to convince them that music is worldly and deserving of criticism but also that their informed opinions matter. As Beane insists, We should ask that the curriculum focus on topics that are of real significance to both young people and the larger society. Justification for the curriculum should be clear. The curriculum should never insult the intelligence of our young people or their capacity to recognize the irrelevant when they see it. We should ask that the curriculum treat students with dignity, as real people who live in the real world and care about its condition and fate. We should ask that the curriculum value the knowledge and experience young people bring with them to school, as well as what they think would be worth pursuing. They should have some say about their own learning experiences, and their say should count for something.2 Music is not just entertainment or titillation but, owing to its capacity to liberate, seduce, or overwhelm, something that profoundly matters to society. Music Education as an Occasion for Intelligence 87 Students need to know that music’s capacity to insinuate itself into the psyche or to obliterate thought can have both positive and negative consequences for them and society.3 Music can “pierce like a painful ray of light directly into the most vulnerable parts of the personality.”4 It can break through our self-defenses in ways that language cannot while helping us to empathize with and learn more about others. In that sense music may be truly liberating. However, music can just as easily be used to cynically manipulate, deceive, or distort (as, for example, when anticapitalist protest music of the Vietnam era is exploited by banks and other businesses for advertising purposes). Perhaps even worse, we are constantly bombarded in our technological society with mind-numbing commercial music that is not meant to be listened to, refused, or resisted—just heard.5 Muzak is only the most glaring example of music that is intended to deaden and manipulate. No one can attend to everything in his or her sonic environment, but it is obviously important that we should exercise our intelligence by learning how to differentiate between the lifeaf firming and the malignant and not just ignore problems or passively submit. Unless we attend to our sonic environments, we may be more susceptible to abuse. This implies teaching children and undergraduates how to exercise careful judgment with respect to what is of musical value while also learning how to express their informed opinions in ways their peers and adults can understand. Music education becomes a public forum in which students practice gaining much needed experience in exploring, critically examining, and sometimes defending their values under adult supervision. Face-to-face conversation is vital to the democratic project because it can enhance learning through mutual feedback and criticism but also because individuals, if they are not to be intimidated and coerced, require practice relating to others as intellectuals.6 Classroom discussion, personal reflections, and critical papers all ought to stimulate the growth of self-confidence and intellectual and emotional maturity in students through provision of appropriate degrees of freedom of choice balanced by constructive criticism and bounded by loving commitment. If the purpose of education is to help students reclaim their authorship of the...