The Future of What We Do

It seems to me that music education, like everything else, is an evolving entity. We might be a bit slower in our evolution, but there is no doubt that we have and are changing. In this country, our emphasis has gone from rote learning and song books to the incorporation of Orff/Kodaly/Dalcroze methods, to the advent of instrumental music in the schools. As I and many others have asked, “Is this the end of the line?” In other words, do we want to continue to perpetuate the same type of education in music that has been going on for the past 50 years? Obviously we cannot. Yet new and veteran teachers alike seem to be more interested in keeping up the vocational-type education that is prevalent in most every school that I am familiar with.

Is this the best way for us to grow our discipline while trying to find and solidify its place in the school curriculum? As several people on this blog have discussed, many people (and I might say most) go into music education for the wrong reasons. Perhaps herein lies the problem. Shouldn’t music teachers be more interested in effectively reaching their students than the mode in which they are reached? Maybe instrumental ensembles are becoming obsolete in schools. I don’t think they are, but even of they were, we would still be ill-equipped to continue music education as a discipline.

As always, I do not have a definitive solution. However, music is music and I believe we as teachers need to not place value judgments on what that means. Our students come to us as blank slates and we should be filling those slates with valuable information, yes, but always allowing that blank slate to find its place in the vast chalkboard of music.