Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
What is education?
The etymology of the word “education” from its various Latin roots gives a good overview of modern senses of the word:
- Educationem: rearing children, animals, plants and promoting physical development
- Educare: to train or mold
- Educo and educere: to lead out, to “teach a man to fish” as per Lao Tzu
Gournay’s proto-feminist educational philosophy focused on the moral development of students. Rousseau expressed his philosophy by depicting a fictional student named Emile who lived in Montessori heaven, doing informal self-guided exploration with an eye toward maintaining his essential goodness.
Dewey holds that education should possess the following characteristics:
- Addresses students’ motivations and interests
- Connects to real-world problems
- Has flexible and contextual aims and objectives
- Enables students to make things, find things out, express themselves artistically and otherwise, and communicate
Per Dewey, kids don’t need “freedom from” structure, teachers, and disciplined inquiry; they need “freedom to” act, learn, grow and interact.
Freire: Education is either a tool for oppression or for liberation. And it needs to make sure students’ basic needs are met first–learning is impossible if you’re hungry. Authentic teaching enacts a clear authority but it is not authoritarian. What’s the difference?
- Being authoritative comes from mastery of subject matter, master musicianship, ethics, mentoring ability
- Being authoritarian is knowledge drummed into students without ethical considerations.
Teachers should helps students overcome paralyzing social constructs. All experiences need to be interrogated, including the teacher’s. “To speak a true word is to transform the world.” He was a devout Aristotelian before he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed–did he have a hidden agenda? A dogma? Did he have some backwards ideas about women?
Noddings argues that education has to address three different spheres: home, occupation, and civic life. That last sphere should help students grow democratically in the Deweyan sense. Teachers should work together with students while also caring for them. Education should have a simultaneous concern for subject matter and student well-being.
Elliott and Silverman want us to understand education as not (only) being accumulated knowledge; skill development; self-discipline; cultural transmission; development of creative and autonomous thinking; preprofessional training; assimilation into the free market. It is not the banking model described by Paulo Freire. It most certainly is not the high-stakes testing, fetishizing of “rigorous” quantitative metrics, privatization, or other corporate neoliberalist innovations. Education should be social praxis: holistic, balanced, ethical, intersubjective, communal. It should motivate active engagement and creativity, and thereby support human flourishing.
Elliott and Silverman further distinguish “EDUCATIONS” from “Education.” EDUCATIONS are all possible instances and forms of teaching and learning in the world. Education is an instance of educational praxis that incorporates the four mutually interacting subjective dimensions of human engagement:
- Persons: learners and teachers of all ages at all ability levels, along with parents, administrators and community members
- Processes: all educative and ethical forms of action and interactions, formal and informal, that lead to growth and development
- Outcomes: musical understandings and enjoyment; personal and social dispositions, activities and transformations
- Contexts: musical, social, political, economic
This definition dovetails well with the progressive music educators who inspired my own music practice, and who described my own substantive music education outside of classrooms. Steve Dillon argues that the point of music education should be to soften emotional blows, and that, done right, music is “a powerful weapon against depression.” We should be creating producers, not just consumers.
Here’s a wonderful (terrible) example of a non-educative attitude among music teachers, from the “you kids like the wrong things” genre.
Another non-educative theme I see in the music world is the concept of talent. I hear it in debates about whether it’s worth devoting resources to teaching “non-talented” students, and I hear it in everyday conversations when people say they abandoned music study because of lack of talent. Whether in-born musical ability exists or not, I can’t say, but I do believe that we need to take a growth mindset and assume that musicians are made rather than born.