of music education

Despite that school teaching and I mutually agreed we weren’t a good fit, since graduating with an undergrad music ed degree I have maintained an interest in music education - admittedly, sometimes only because I find myself so critical of how it is done.

Anyway, a Christmas gift I got this year was the first volume of Choksy’s “The Kodály Method”. Apparently this was the modern genesis of the idea that music is integral to education.

I have at times thought this idea to be overly “romanticizing” music’s importance. After all, does being able to clap rhythms get any non-musicians a job? If you were stranded on a desert island and had to survive, would music be of much assistance there?

But the more I have thought about it, the more I arrive at ideas like, “if I were stranded on a desert island, there is very little that I ever learned in school that would help me to survive.” Knowing multiplication tables does not provide food or shelter any more than singing a scale in tune does!

I guess the question really is, “what is the purpose of school education?” In the sense that school education is designed to inculturate children, then music education certainly is integral to a curriculum, as are PE and all those other “easy” classes that so many found to be a warm refuge from the oppressiveness of, say, math and literature.

I think Spe salvi hit on a topic that ought to be discussed far beyond the subject of religion: what, precisely, constitutes this idea of “progress”? I love technology, and if it helps us to live longer and/or to mitigate physical pain or to communicate more easily, then great, but why are those things termed “progress”?

Progress toward what?

As to music education, I have “re-become” a convert to the idea of its integrality in a school curriculum, insofar as music is part of our culture, and we owe it to future generations to teach it to them.