CHAPTER 4

Education
... to be educated is not to have arrived; it is to travel with a different view.
R. S. PETERS The Concept of Education
The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite
meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.
JOHN DEWEY Democracy and Education
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to
assume responsibility for it... where we decide whether we love our children enough
... to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
HANNAH ARENDT Between Past and Future
What is education? More importantly, what should education be?
How do we develop a critically reflective concept of education for music
education?
What is the relationship between music education and general education?
For better and worse, what forces affect education?
What factors differentiate nonformal, informal, and formal teaching and
learning?
Why should school music and community music (CM) educators bother thinking about
any of these questions?
E
ducationducation, edikasyon, edukacja, paidheia, educacin, pedagogia,
education, ewtbildning, undervisning, oideachas. One of the first things we
notice about education is its universality. For thousands of generations,
education whether nonformal, informal, formal, or some combination of thesehas
been a central concern of all human civilizations. Thus, tens of millions of people
past and presentparents, grandparents, siblings, communities, informal and formal
teachers, teacher educators, researchers, administrators, policy makershave
invested time, thought, effort, energy, passion, care, money, and even their entire
professional lives in organizing and carrying out various forms of teaching and
learning.
Another thing we notice is how parents, teachers, scholars, and societies
variously conceptualize the natures and values of education for the purpose of
guiding everyday teaching and learning. Teachers and scholars in every part of the
world develop, rethink, challenge, and research alternative ways of understanding
education. These efforts are often linked to one or more domains of educational
research, in particular educational philosophy, psychology, neuroscience,
sociology, economics, technology, leadership and administration, policy
development, curriculum studies, evaluation, and race and gender studies.
Of course, rapid advances in new technologies, global economic interdependent cies,
massive waves of immigration in various nations, regional wars, and devastating
instances of human disease, poverty, racism, and other forms of social injustice
are only some of the ever-changing societal forces altering all levels and forms of
education everywhere.
The complexity of education has increased exponentially during the last fifty years
or so. Some nations public and private education systems have evolved
dramatically; other nations schools are starving and dying. Many prosperous
nations have witnessed continuous improvements, divisions, and subdivisions in
their educational systems to meet the needs and interests of a wide spectrum of
twenty-first- century students and the demands of local, regional, and national
educational authorities. Familiar divisions include preschool, primary, secondary,
and tertiary education; vocational or technical education; pre-tertiary (or
community college) education; adult and continuing education; charter schools (in
the United States); private and public magnet schools specializing in (for example)
arts education, science and technology, or culinary arts; and various forms of
online and distance education.
What explains humanitys broad, deep, long-standing, and universal concern for
education? How could it be otherwise? How could any society, past or present,
neglect to think seriously about why, what, how, where, and when its young people
should learn? How could any societyancient or contemporaryfail to provide for its
childrens growth and flourishing, and for the future survival of its society and
culture? And how could any society overlook considerations of why, what, and how
its citizens should be prepared for lifelong and lifewide learning during their
working lives, not to mention the fundamental aim of achieving and living a
meaningful and fulfilling personal and social life?
As John Dewey says, given the biological inevitability of the birth and death of
each one of the constituent members in a social group,1 education is a necessity
because the life of the society as a whole must go on.2 In other words, education
marks a non-optional concept3 because education, or the lack thereof, affects
everyone inside and outside every community and nation and in our globalized world
as a whole. One among many indications of educations enormous social importance is
the fact that whenever a Society encounters a serious national or international
crisis, politicians and citizens:often attribute the crisis to failures in the
nations educational system. In doing so, however, these politicians and citizens
often overlook their own political, social, and financial responsibilities to
guarantee that their nation (or its states, provinces, and districts) will
maintain and support excellent teacher education programs, teachers salaries, and
school systems for all its citizens, not just a select few.4
qhe youngest of our species cannot survive to maturity without acquiring a keen
reitess of and critical and creative dispositions toward their cultures and the
ability 9 0lve everyday problems. In the beginning, the only source of such
dispositions and tlities is from elders. So even though human infants and children
are highly depen- 3 nt and vulnerable, its obvious to most adults that with proper
care and guidance, d & with the involvement of families, communities, and informed
and educative a>1 chers, most children can learn to care for themselves and others,
develop positive and dispositions, and pursue socially appropriate and productive
action.5 jy[ost people understand also that in the absence of informal education
and formal pooling, various degrees of social chaos, crime, and inhumanity will
likely follow.
If these observations are accurate, is it possible to say what counts as proper
forms of care, guidance, instruction, and motivation that teachers should provide
for students with varying aims, interests, desires, dreams, and abilities? More
broadly, is jt possible to conceptualize the nature of education to everyones
satisfaction such that communities and nations can judge whether theyre succeeding
in educating their citizens? Yes and no. Given the breath and depth of educational
scholarship, and many generations of teachers wisdom and practical experience, we
have good reason to believe its possible to conceptualize education fairly well,
but not completely, and certainly not to everyones satisfaction. Like music,
education is a highly contested and notoriously slippery concept, and teaching and
learning are always situated in specific social-cultural contexts that are ever-
changing.
But these challenges must not deter us. Too much is at stake to under-think
education. The natures, values, aims, and processes of education must be revisited
continuously because, for better and worse, theories and practices change with the
varying needs and priorities of societies and with evolving scholarship about why,
what, how, where, and when people in innumerable personal and social situations
need and want to learn. As philosopher Nel Noddings says:
In every age . . . [educational] questions have elicited better or worse responses,
and thoughtful people continue to examine the old responses, to generate new ones
induced by changing conditions, and to reflect on current responses in the interest
of making education as good as it can be.6
Educational scholar Philip Jackson agrees:
as educators we must learn to do whatever we do professionally better than weve
done it to date . . . [and] we need to learn not just how to improve on current
practices but also how to think differently about education. We need to approach it
afresh from time to time, to look at it from a new angle. This calls for
reexamining many of our old ways of thinking... In short, we need to rethink
education.7
1. PLAN OF THE CHAPTER
This chapter unfolds in four stages. In the first stage, we ask and answer a basic
question: Why should music teachers or CM facilitators of any kind, at any level,
think about what education is or what it might involve?
In stage two, we discuss various meanings of the word education. This discussion
will employ several strategies we used in our examination of music. In stage
three, we examine the writings of a select group of highly influential thinkers and
educational scholars past and present. The aim of this stage is to assess the
extent to which these thinkers offer logical, ethical, and pragmatic arguments we
can use to help us understand the nature(s) and values of EDUCATIONS and build a
foundation for a praxial concept of education.
From what we learn in the first three stages of this chapter, well outline the
basic themes and principles of our praxial concept of educationsour concept of
education as social praxesand its relationships to music education and CM
facilitating, which wont be complete until the end of the book.
2. LIMITATIONS
As we said in our discussion of musics, a philosophy can never say all there is to
say about something. This applies as much to education as it does to musics, if not
more. Thus, we will not attempt to develop a comprehensive philosophy of education.
Doing so is far beyond the scope of this book, let alone the present chapter.
Moreover, the normative domain of educational philosophy is an enormously complex,
international, and fluid field of scholarship. Consequently, a massive number of
magnificent thinkers past and present offer us much to consider in attempting to
grasp what education is.
In what follows, we attempt to conceptualize education with an awareness of
important themes in the writings of selected philosophers of education. We do so
with the expectation that these themes may have strong potential for expanding our
understandings of the natures and values of music education, music curriculum de-
velopment, music teaching-learning strategies, and so forth.
In summary, the best we can do in this chapter is to present critically reflective
perspectives on education that are reasonable in and of themselves and,
normatively, in relation to our praxial concept of music and music education.
Subsequent chapters elaborate the educational themes of this chapter in greater
depth.
3. STAGE ONE: WHY THINK ABOUT EDUCATION?
At this point, some readers might be wondering why weve included a chapter on
education in this book. And some might be saying to themselves something like, Im
a talented musician; I know what Im doing when I teach music because Im a very
good performer. Or, I know how to improvise and compose, and Im a whiz with the
latest music technologies. So why waste my time thinking about what education is?
Or, Teaching is something anybody can do with a little experience. Everything I
need to know follows automatically from the music itself.
With respect, we disagree completely with these statements and others like them.
Although'Strong music-making abilities and knowledge about many aspects of music
are absolutely necessary for becoming and being an effective music teacher, they
are not enough. The opposite also holds: having a solid understanding of major
concepts and principles in the fields of educational philosophy, educational
psychology, sociology, best practices, and so forth is not enough, either.
Possessing conceptual knowledge about education, teaching, and learning will not
make someone a
o0d teacher. Theory and practice must always be integrated and balanced continu- ^
jy_ If you have doubts about or disagree with our premise that any musician who
jeaches music should think carefully about the natures and values of education,
take a moment to think about your own experiences as a music student.
Have you ever taken private voice or instrumental lessons from someone who ^aS an
exceptional musician., but who was unable to communicate effectively, or obviously
didnt care about teaching, or who ignored your personal learning style, or wbo was
unable to help you solve your musical problems because he or she had limited range
of teaching strategies? Have you ever participated in a school band, a songwriting
class, a guitar ensemble, a school choir, a school garage band, a chamber jiiiisic
ensemble, or a CM group led by a teacher, a conductor, an informal facilitator, or
a tradition bearer who was condescending, or only knew one way (his or her way) t0
teach everyone, or ignored your questions about or thoughts on some issue, or made
your musical education a burden rather than a joy? Finally, have you ever taken a
university or conservatory course with a brainy professor who was boring,
impatient, disorganized, unsympathetic, dogmatic, self-absorbed, or unfair?
Admittedly evaluations of any kind (official or not) are never objective.
Nevertheless, it sometimes happensand students usually know it when they see it
that some school music conductors/teachers, professional performers, artist-
teachers, and other musicians are more or less miseducative because they dont
believe it takes knowledge about the art and theory of education, teaching, and
learning to be an effective educator of any kind. To them, music education is for
people who cant perform well enough to be real musicians; teaching is not
something real musicians need to worry about because anyone can teach, despite
copious research and practical evidence to the contrary.
Have we ever had poor teachers ourselves? You bet. Did they know they were weak or
incompetent? Some did, but they didnt care enough to improve. Others were too
proud to seek advice or work hard enough to learn how to teach effectively. At the
university level, professors who dont teach well often fail to notice their
weaknesses, unless teaching is a key element in evaluations of their tenure and
promotion applications. Regardless of the situation, students are usually aware
when its their teacher who is the person failing the class.
Teaching is not something people are born doing or just pick up. Music and
education are completely different domains of skill and understandingtheyre
completely different social practiceswhich, and depending on the age and abilities
(and other characteristics) of the learners involved, require various kinds of
practical experience, informed cognitive-affective intuitions, interpersonal
sensitivities, metacognitive knowledge, and more. Implicit here is that one size
does not fit all in music education. All of us are simultaneously individual and
social beings. People learn things in their own ways and at their own pace. We do
so because who we are affects everything we do, including learning. Being a
successful practitioner of the applied art of music education depends as much on
informed and practiced teaching abilities, theoretical and practical
understandings of various teaching-learning strategies, and habits of mind and
heartmeaning; commitment, dedication, compassion, patience, hard-won teaching
experience, educational savvy, interpersonal and intrapersonal knowledge, and
skills of improvisatory, on-the-spot decision makingas it
does on knowing how to make music expressively and creatively and listen to music
keenly and deeply.
One way to stress the importance of being a well-informed, critical, and effective
educator is to emphasize how easily teaching musical performance can be abused.
That is, although we strongly support the teaching and learning of all forms of
musical performingin all kinds of small and large pop, classical, non-Western, and
Western groupslearning to perform is not necessarily a good thing. It depends.
Teaching music performance in the context of a wind band, chorus, orchestra, jazz
ensemble, and so forth is not necessarily a matter of power and control (indeed,
there are many deeply democratic, sensitive, and compassionate performance
educators), but sadly there are many school, private studio, and CM contexts in
which the doing and thinking of amateur performers is highly controlled by
undemocratic, insensitive, authoritarian, and miseducative teachers. As Wayne
Bowman says:
Approached without due consideration for what besides the music is being learned,
the skilled performance of beautiful music may even be harmful. Musical
instruction can humanize, but it can and arguably often does dehumanize. Thus, as
David Best has persuasively argued, education in the arts has an utterly
inescapable moral dimension: No teacher, he writes, can avoid the moral
responsibility of deciding what to teach and how to teach it.12
Focusing only on the musiconly on skills of precise musical executionin music
education leads some music educators to gloss the educational side, with
consequences not just potentially troublesome, but at times highly undesirable.13
So, by itself, being able to make music well fails to provide whats required to
empower students musical growth and full human flourishing. When a miseducative
musician overemphasizes musical details at the expense of educational matters,
then music learning is reduced to training students technical, notational, and
aural skills, or stuffing learners heads with abstract concepts about music. In
such cases, music education becomes purely subject-centered, rather than a
continuous and harmonious process of integrating learner-arid-subject experiences,
which is what education includes, and much, much more besides. Training, says Peter
Abbs,
invariably involves a narrowing down of consciousness to master certain techniques
or skills. These ... are known in advance and can be unambiguously imparted by the
trainer and assimilated by the learner. What is transmitted is functional and
predetermined, a set of skills matching a set of operations.8
Training, says Bowman, transmits skills related tightly to perpetuating the status
quo: it seeks to shape behaviors to pre-specified ends. Education, on the other
hand, involves an opening out of the mind that transcends detail and skill and
whose movetaent cannot be predicted. 9 What education should do is take the
student \
beyond the status quo into what is not fully known, fully comprehended, fully
formalized. Education is the expression and development of a primary impulse for
truth, a deep epistemic instinct that we inherit as part of our biological
nature.10
,oreover, because musics are exceptionally diverse and ever-changing phenomena, j
because all students are unique persons, theres nothing in the music itself that
^jll tell us everything we need to know about how to plan teaching-learning
encounters or about how to develop and apply a range of appropriate teaching-
learning trategies to meet the needs of different learners, or about developing
appropriate Ians or curricula (whether informal or formal) for specific situations,
and so forth, ^earning these things takes time, effort, dedication, and knowledge
of, for example, child development, adult education, and various approaches to
educational psychology. as we^ as bw t0 generate an<3 sustainnot manage
effective and enjoyable classroom learning.
In the same way competent and proficient musicians in all musics learn how across
a broad continuum of variations on nonformal, informal, and formal, and personal
and collective learningto apply and embody the technical, theoretical, historical,
intuitive, and experiential dimensions of their music making and music listening,
competent and proficient teachers must do the same.
How shall we summarize the inadequaciesand quite possibly the dangers that can
arise from the actionsof people who claim to teach music but know or care little
about education, teaching, and learning? Paraphrasing the words of the great French
philosopher Michel Foucault, we can say that excellent musicians usually know what
theyre doing musically, and they often know why they do what they do . as
musicians, but what they do not usually know when they teach is why and what
their words and actions as teachers do to or for learners.11
To balance our argument, we must acknowledge that some music teachers dont possess
a sufficient level of musical ability and knowledge to qualify as music teach-ers
of any kind. Just as any parent would object to having her child taught Spanish by
someone who cant speak Spanish fluently, we must object to music teachers who
cant make music fluently and inform students effectively about key aspects of what
music involves, including theoretical, historical, social, cultural, political,
artistic, and creative dimensions of music making, musical processes, musical
products, and so forth. However, its unreasonable to criticize music teachers who
do not meet the criteria required of superstar musicians, whether concert
pianists, jazz vocalists, or master drummers from Ghana or Brazil. Of course, many
music teachers do teach and perform professionally. In fact, many music teachers do
meet the criteria of excellent performers, composers, arrangers, conductors,
record producers, and so forth.12
Unfortunately, some musical music teachers, and even a few music education
philosophers, tend to obsess about educational theories, curriculum innovations,
and every new national music standard or music technology that comes down the
road. Thinking critically and balancing musical and educational issues and
priorities is a necessity. Yes, this is a huge challenge. However, when unique
individuals (learners) are involved, the simple equation music + education doesnt
necessarily equal whats needed for empowering school students, adult community
music makers, and others to enjoy and flourish from their journeys toward the kinds
of musical abilities and experiences they wish to achieve, and the transformative
musical values that an educative music education can provide. Bowman, both an
outstanding music education philosopher and jazz musician, explains how important
it is to balance our musical and educational concerns.
Attention to educational outcomes may and sometimes does lead to neglect of the
music. An uncompromising focus on the educational reasons for learning musicthe
numerous and diverse ways it may benefit students livesmay slight the substantial
musical accomplishments upon which such educational aims and claims are predicated.
This is clearly undesirable from the perspective of those concerned to be music
educators. The balance between emphasis upon music and upon education is a
delicate, even a precarious one.13
Indeed, an overemphasis on teaching music in adherence to this or that educational
theory can easily devolve to another kind of malpractice. A teacher who fully
embraces the theoretical principles of (say) behaviorism, brain-based learning, or
critical pedagogy is (with the best intentions, or not) placing a favorite theory
before students personhood, well-being, and individual musical desires. Moreover,
educational theories are often created by or imported from thinkers who are not
active musicians (amateur or professional) themselves. Thus, even though they may
listen to music, these individuals dont possess the embodied musical skills,
understandings, experiences, and savvy involved in actual music making. They
cannot make reasonable recommendations about how we should construct strategies and
contexts that are most conducive to educating people musically. Even worse,
educational theories that are not primarily intended for music education usually
fail to explain the why, what, and how of facilitating students visceral,
phenomenal, and emotional musical experiences. At its worst, an overemphasis on
this or that pedagogy pushes students musical actions and experiences into the
background. In these circumstances, music classrooms become nothing more than
little think tanks where students carry out the teachers pet theory or
intellectualize (talk, talk, talk) about one or more dimensions of music at the
expense of active, expressive, and creative music making and listening.
What weve just said does not mean teachers should avoid educational theories that
have the potential to support and encourage students understandings of why, what,
and how music can express and affect (positively and negatively) crucial matters
of social justice, democratic engagement, and other equally important human-
social-political issues and values. All praxial and pragmatic philosophies of music
education, including ours, place a high value on music teaching and learning that
includes these issues and values. The development of peoples musical
understandings, musical expressiveness, and musical creativity should include
learning about how musical processes, products, and contexts are used and abused to
communicate and influence listeners beliefs about and concepts of culture, race,
gender, politics, ethics, and so forth. If we fail to include this type of
learning, then students will not have the opportunities they need to experience and
benefit from musics deep power to shape habits, personality, character, and in
turn, to shape social and cultural orders.14 ,
Music education is first and foremost about people, about personhood, and about
interpersonal relationships. Making informed decisions about the kinds of human in-
teractions that music education should involve is crucial for making decisions
about all matters of music education and CM. These decisions include why, what,
how, where, and when to enable people of differing ages, abilities, and musical
interests to engage with music effectively, artistically, enjoyably, reflectively,
democratically, and
t}iically- Without thinking carefully about what counts as the most humanly benefi-
,al interactl0ns of school music and CM, teachers have no basis for designing
music ^rficula, best teaching-learning experiences and strategies, or assessment
methods. ts rephrase the last point. In view of what we said in Chapter 2 about
phronesis, its sential that we ask ourselves how teaching any aspect of music
music making, listening pieces of music, and musical experiencesactually enables
students to kieve the diverse human values or goods that music can offer,
portunately, many music educators and community musicians strive to be and pecome
artistic, creative, educative, and ethical professionals. We enter the field of
jjsic education not only because we love music, but also because we care about the
rowth and developmentmusical and personalof the people we endeavor to teztch,
welcome into, and assist in school and CM contexts. Will we always succeed?
we always meet the highest professional standards we can possibly imagine? It
depends, because teachers are people, too, meaning that we are fallible beings.
In summary, an educative and ethical music educator or community musician is a
person who is knowledgeable about and experienced in formulating and applying the
means and the ends of music teaching and learning, and sensitive to the diversity
0f students needs in our continuously evolving cultural, national, and global
societies- To help students achieve the values of both music and education,
musicians- teachers need to be as informed as possible about the natures and values
of education, teaching, learning, and allied issues.
Educational philosopher Joseph Dunne emphasizes that the most important aspect of
teaching occurs at the level at which we decide what kind of interaction it is...
A decision at this level has the heaviest consequences not only for how we
understand but also how we go about doing it.15 Bowman takes these themes to a
deeper level: musical instruction can humanize, but it can and arguably does
dehumanize and desensitize because [some] teachers neglect their ethical
responsibilities to do no harm or to pay attention to the growth of music
students as people.16 Elsewhere, Bowman states: "Music education is not just about
music, it is about students, and it is about teachers, and it is about the kind of
societies we hope to build together.17
4. STAGE TWO: FIRST STEPS TO A CONCEPT OF EDUCATION
There are four strategies we can use to begin thinking critically about the nature
of education. The first strategy splits into two routes.
The first route of the first strategy involves etymology. The word education
derives from (1) the Latin word educationem, which had several meanings in ancient
times, including rearing children, animals, plants, and promoting physical
development; and (2) educo, from e- (out of, or from) and duco (I lead).18 In
these early senses, there was no clear link between education and what we typically
consider knowledge. However, two other Latin roots of educationeducare and educere
take us deeper. Whereas educare means "to train or to mold, educere means "to
lead out.19 Lao Tzu, the Chinese founder of Taoism, captures the key difference
between educare and educere: If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If
you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
This etymological history continues to fuel educational debates in many nations On
one hand, some policy makers and teachers argue that education (as educare) should
focus on transmitting and testing basic skills, facts, and traditional academic
subject matter. On the other hand, some argue that education (as educere) should
prepare todays youth for future challenges by emphasizing the development of crit
ical and creative thinking, as well as deep understandings (as opposed to bits of
information). As educational researcher Maurice Craft says, educare calls for rote
memorization and becoming good workers, whereas educere requires questioning,
thinking, and creating.20 Bowman elaborates:
Educare involves the preservation of knowledge and tradition, prepares the young to
fit into existing circumstances, and sees learners as recipients or consumers of
knowledge. Educere involves preparing new generations for the inevitability of
change, prepares the young to create solutions to problems yet unknown, and sees
learners as creators or producers of knowledge. Thus we find associated in a single
term two remarkably divergent understandings of education that involve two very
different kinds of teaching and two very different kinds of outcome.21
Unfortunately, even if communities want teachers and schools to fulfill both
functions, many Western governments and schools operate in terms of educare.
Our understanding of the normative nature of education deepens when we move to
other historical and social contexts. For example, around 1600 in England some
writers began to associate education with systematic schooling, especially (but not
always) as training for work. Interestingly, in the Taming of the Shrew (1590),
Shakespeare presents alternative views on the natures and values of education as
formal and real-world learning and on the place of music in education. Concerning
Biancas education, Traino says: And, toward the education of your daughters, /1
here bestow a simple instrument [a lute], / And this small packet of Greek and
Latin books: / If you accept them, then their worth is great (Act II, Scene I).
Some literary scholars suggest not only that education is an important theme in
this play, but also that it demonstrates Shakespeares attitude toward the
education of women, which is either positive or negative, depending on the scholar
you read.22 Later in the play, Bianca insists on controlling her own informal
education: Why gentlemen, you do me double wrong, / To strive for that which
resteth in my choice. /1 am no breeching scholar in the schools; / Ill not be tied
to hours nor 'pointed times, / But learn my lessons as I please myself (Act III,
Scene I).
A shift in context provides another sense of education. In a location that stood
near present-day Boston, the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
believed that failing to educate the young was a serious moral and legal
failure.23 Therefore, in 1642 they passed laws requiring parents to teach their
children to read the Bible and learn the principles of Puritanism.24 In addition,
Puritan laws required every village with fifty or more families to have a school.
In locations with fewer than fifty families, children went to schools run by women
in their homes.25
Lets now turn to other languages for further ideas about the nature of education.
Doing so yields more clues, but it also brings more confusion, because cultures use
the word education in relation to different processes and institutions. For
example, istruzione (Italian) seems to include education, instruction, schooling,
and training;
ranges across education, upbringing, good manners, and politeness. Unterricht $
0an) seems to roam across education, tuition, instruction, teaching, and lesson W
f Whakaakoranga (Maori) translates as education, doctrine, lesson, teaching, and
ion. Undervisning (Danish) seems to cover education, teaching, instruction, and
goring- Ensenanza (Spanish) may mean teaching, education, instruction, lesson, tU j
schooling, while pedagogia may mean pedagogy, pedagogies, education, teach- 0 a0d
teaching methods. And even though o6pa3oeauue (Russian, obrazovanie) in^nS
education, formation, generation, schooling, and background, o6pa3oeaHHocmb
razovannosf ) means erudition, accomplishments, and education. Clearly, the lesson
[ this brief survey is one weve already learned: education is not a one-
dimensional, ^e-neutral idea, but a vague and highly normative concept thats
impossible to separate from its social-cultural context.
The second strategy splits into three closely related routes. Route one reviews
simple everyday answers that some offer when asked, What is education? Route two
examines dictionaries and other standard references for slightly more refined
definitions of education, which may be useful in either peeling away ambiguities
or revealing biases that infect peoples hasty notions about what education should
be.
Here are five common notions of what education is or should be:
1. Education is the knowledge accumulated, or that must be accumulated, by
students after they study content areas in school.
2. Education is the development of skills, knowledge, and self-discipline.
3. Education is the process.of cultural transmission.
4. Education is the development of autonomous and creative thinkers.
5. Education is the process of preparing students to earn a living.
What can we take from these simplistic notions? On one hand, we reject any sense of
education that resembles any form of indoctrination (i.e., simplistic knowledge
ac-cumulation, or efforts to control students minds and hearts). The British
writer Doris Lessing paints a picture of how an educative teacher might explain
miseduca- tion to a student:
What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices
of this particular culture . . . You are being taught by people who have been able
to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors.
It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual
than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself
educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the
time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and
particular needs of this particular society.26
To some degree, its reasonable to say that formal education should be concerned
with developing students skills, knowledge, creativity, cultural understandings,
and so forth. But a moments thought exposes the inadequacies of these short
definitions. Were not saying one or all of them are completely wrong. Were saying
that, as stated, theyre extremely incomplete and, therefore, unacceptable as a
basis for a justifiable concept of education. Without extensive elaboration, and
without a reasonable understanding of what key terms meandevelopment, skills,
knowledge) school subjects, self-discipline, culture, transmission, autonomous, and
creative-., these definitions lack the depth educators need to understand, plan,
and carry out ef, fective, balanced, inclusive ... in a word, educative music
education.
The fifth notionthat education is the process of preparing students to earn a
livingdeserves special attention because its become the dominant ideology of edu,
cation in the last thirty years in many Western countries. The name of this
ideology is neoliberalism. Many contemporary political, economic, and educational
scholars furnish lucid criticisms of the meanings and the tragic effects of
neoliberalism, in, eluding: Diane Ravitch, Nel Noddings, Henry Giroux, Stanley
Aronowitz, Michael Apple, Deborah Meier, and Alfie Kohn.
Its impossible for us to provide a satisfactory summary of these scholars in,
sights. Nevertheless, its essential that we offer a brief explanation of its key
proposi, tions and the disastrous consequences its had on numerous aspects of
daily life in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and several other
nations during recent decades. After we review some of the main features and
criticisms of neoliberalism, perhaps youll find this ideology as objectionable as
we do. For one thing, neoliberal politicians, policy makers, and administrators
past and present have been very successful in cutting the arts and other
unprofitable subjects from school curricula. Why?
At first glance, neoliberalism seems benign because it seems to make financial
sense to many people in our globalized world. Moreover, neoliberals have been
masterful in conveying and marketing their ideology as nothing more than a common-
sense, socially beneficial reform movement aimed at improving the lives of all
citizens by making trade between nations easier and facilitating the [global]
movement of goods, resources and enterprises in a bid to always find cheaper
resources, to maximize profits and efficiency.27 In other words, a core premise of
neoliberalism is that the free market, which many incorrectly associate with
democracy, should he allowed to determine all aspects of government policy making
and economic, political, and social life.
However, to ensure that the free market has unfettered free reign to determine
prices, incomes, and so forth, neoliberals (usually the wealthiest members of
Western societies) aggressively pressure governments to reduce or cease funding to
as many social services as possible, notably education, health care, water and
electrical services, and so on.
Neoliberals seek to privatize as many dimensions of public life as possible in
order to reap a continuous stream of profits from the public sector. Among many
effects of neoliberalist policies is the gradual demise of public and community
good and the rise of virulent individualism and rabid capitalism. As philosopher
and historian Philip Mirowski explains, neoliberals have largely succeeded in
camouflaging their agenda as progress and a natural and inexorable state of
mankind28 when, in fact, its actually a right-wing movement driven by economic
and political fundamentalists who want to erase distinctions among the state,
society, and the market and subordinate society to the market.29
As a result, says Henry Giroux, the democratic mission of public education is
under assault by a conservative right-wing reform culture in which students are
J CHAPTER 4 Education I19
viewed as human capital in schools that are to be administered by market-driVen
forces-30 Not surprisingly, says Giroux, corporate leaders, local business
leaders, and hedge fund managers in the United States now sit on school boards
across the coun. try doing everything in their power to eliminate public schools
and punish unionized teachers who do not support31 the privatization of public
schools, evaluation proceSSes, curriculum development, and so forth. Thus, the
administration of American schools is gradually becoming the domain of managers
trained in accordance with best business practices, not school principals
educated as educators. Schools and universities are being reconceived,
reconfigured, and branded as businesses and corporations that are better equipped
to raise the standards of education, teaching, and learning. Neoliberals argue
that education can only be reformed by adopting and imposing on schools the
corporate aims, techniques, and profit-driven measurements that dominate American
business, which, of course, place little value on arts education.
So, the real reason that public schools are under assault is not because they are
failing (though some are), but because they are one of the few public spheres left
where people can learn the knowledge and skills necessary to allow them to think
critically and hold power and authority accountable ... the democratic ideals at
the heart of public education are now up for sale.32 The overriding concern of
neoliberal education emphasizes producing workers fit for the short-term needs
of global business. Sadly, neoliberal policies are succeeding in their quest to
produce students public school and university studentswho laud conformity,
believe job training is more important than education, and view public values as
irrelevant.33 Whereas democratic public schooling seeks to develop independent and
creative thinkers who can recognize oppressive and unjust public policies when they
detect them, neoliberal schooling seeks to prevent such thinking.
Neoliberal billionaires supply massive funding to organizations that will market,
support, and carry out their educational agenda. For example, the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation richly rewards government bodies and policies that create and
manage schools according to Gates extremely narrow corporate concept of what
education and schooling should be. Were not denying that Gates contributes to many
worthy causes worldwide. But in the realm of education, his considerable lack of
knowledge about the natures and values of education and schooling, along with his
corporate mentality, have done enormous damage to public education in the United
States and in other nations where his model is mimicked.
The tools that federal and state governments use to power neoliberal reform include
(for example) simplistic versions of behavioral psychology that reward students
and teachers when they meet input-output benchmarks, curriculum standards, and
simplistic high-stakes test scores. Clearly, todays pseudo-reformers are not
concerned with education in the sense of providing a balanced curriculum for the
whole child. If they were, they would use holistic evaluations; balance their
emphasis on math and reading with an equal emphasis on the arts, history, physical
education, and literature (and so forth); and supply broad and deep funding for
teacher education, teaching salaries, and high-quality school facilities.
Richard Colwell, a music education scholar and assessment expert, emphasizes that
educational reform in the United States and otherbut not allnations is
directed and driven by politicians and business leaders who put marketplace
capitalism
above all else. Marketplace educators will fund schools, programs, and teachers jf
and only if teachers are successful in preparing students to compete successfully
not only for jobs in their own country so better products are made and grown, buj.
with competitors throughout the world.34 The educational theorist Michael Appie
agrees: For all too many of the pundits, politicians, corporate leaders, and
others education is a business and should be treated no differently than any other
bu$p ness.35 Apple argues that Americas turn toward standardized curricula, high-
stakes testing, merit pay, and other neoliberal tools is rooted in business
leaders fear of dwindling profits in the face of growing global competition.
Unfortunately, says Apple, neoliberal forces are taking control of American
education by boiling it down to reductionist aims of economic productivity and a
return to rigor and non. critical thinking. In short; whatever can be tested by
means of scientific methods is what gets taught and valued in schools.
Suffice it to say that although education-via-schooling should prepare a nations
citizens to make a living, the serious deficit of neoliberal notions of education
is their glaring omission of crucial dimensions of personhood: the development of
students character, flourishing, empathy, happiness, ethical conduct, and a
positive and proactive disposition to work for the benefit of others. Education
should empower students to make a life as well as a living.
As psychologist Sandra Carey says: Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps
you make a living; the other helps you make a life. David Orr goes further when he
argues that education has a responsibility to prepare people of moral courage
willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs
have little to do with success as our [profit-driven] culture has defined it.36
Orrs words return us to the long-standing aims debatethat is, educare versus
educerebetween those who insist on training for success and those who want an
inclusive, person-centered model of education that prepares people holistically for
broad and deep life values as well as work. Although we reject neoliberal premises,
is it possible to combine a non-neoliberal approach to job preparation with a
balanced curriculum for future citizens? We must. As philosopher David Carr
insists, any society or state inclined toward such an [oversimplified] either-or
conclusion on this important issue would be ... irresponsible.37
The upshot of this discussion is that whenever music educators are required to
adhere to curriculum standards, or use the lesson plan templates of math and
reading teachers, or measure students musical achievements with simplistic
rubrics, the reasons for doing so are not educational or educative. Theyre the
tools and consequences of neoliberal economics and politics. They are logically,
ethically, and educationally unjustifiable.
At this point, well move to the second part of stage two to demonstrate the
similarities, differences, mistakes, and biases found in dictionary definitions,
questionable online sources, and encyclopedia entries on education.
The American Heritage Dictionary38 defines education in four ways: the act or
process of educating or being educated (a circular and useless definition), the
knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process, the field of
study concerned with the pedagogy of teaching and learning, and an instructive or
enlightening experience.
From Wikipedia:
education in its general sense is a form of learning in which knowledge, skills,
and habits of a group of people are transferred from one generation to the next
through teaching, training, research, or simply through autodidacticism. Gener-
ally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one
thinks, feels, or acts.39
In the Encyclopedia of Education, Mun Tsang attempts to legitimatize todays
Ohsession with corporate models of education, defining education as
. a production process in which inputs (such as students, teachers, and textbooks)
are combined to yield desired outputs (such as student learning) within the
education sector and larger societal outcomes outside the sector (such as
increased earnings in the workplace or greater social equality), under the
prevailing educational technology (encompassing pedagogy, curriculum, and school
organization) and input prices.40
An excerpt from the Encyclopedia of Informal Education41 provides a more
enlightened and holistic concept of education, a definition that contains many
themes that educational philosophers endorse:
Education is a deliberate process of drawing out learning (educere), of encouraging
and giving time to discovery. It is an intentional act. At the same time it is, as
John Dewey put it, a social processa process of living and not a preparation for
future living. As well as being concerned with learning that we set out to
encouragea process of inviting truth and possibilityit is also based in certain
values and commitments such as a respect for others and for truth. Education is
born, it could be argued, of the hope and desire that all may share in life and be
more. For many concerned with education, it is also a matter of grace and
wholeness, wherein we engage fully with the gifts we have been given.
In the International Encyclopedia of Education, Lawrence Cremin argues that
education is the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke,
or acquire knowledge, attitudes, skills, values, or sensibilities, and any learning
that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended.42 On
one hand, the problem with Cremins definition is the difficulty of interpreting and
applying his key terms, each of which requires nuanced explanations: deliberate,
systematic, sustained, transmit, acquire, knowledge, skills, and so forth.
On the other hand, Cremins expanded definition is notable for its inclusion of
self-education, learners daily nonformal encounters with natural phenomena, and
every type of informal learning that people experience during their everyday
interactions with parents, peers, pets, elders, colleagues, religious
institutions, extracurricular clubs, museums, media of all kinds, and so forth.
Overall then, Cremins perspective is ecological because it takes into account "the
entire system of educative agents in society and the sociocultural and economic
system within which education (formal, nonformal, and informal) operates.43
Implicit in Cremins ecological concept is his lifelong opposition to the conflation
of education and schooling. In his view, this conflation leads to a portentous
reification, to overlooking the real recipient of education: education ceases to be
an experience of persons, and becomes

a characteristic of cohorts, statistical groups whose tested attributes augur

success Qr failure.44
On the basis of the results of the first two strategies, its easy to eliminate a
thirq tripartite strategy.
First, some people might be tempted to conceptualize education by developing a list
of undisputed cases of excellent schools or school systems, or best educative
practices, or fully educated students, or true education that everyone in the
world would most likely accept. But of all possible examples, what could we select
our undisputed cases? Seeking undisputed cases of what is truly educational gets
i,s nowhere. As weve already seen, education has no universally accepted
definition that we could use as a basis for sifting and sorting all global
instances of what ecluca. tion is or should be.
Second, one might conduct some kind of qualitative study of masses of people around
the world to develop a complete profile of what most people count as mean, ingful
or transformative educational experiences. The obvious flaw in this is that theres
no reasonable or practical way of generating such a profile or saying how such a
profile could or should be used to develop a concept of education.
Third, someone might be tempted to use persona] understandings and experiences of
education (e.g., memories of what, when, and how he or she has learned most deeply)
as a basis for deciding the necessary and sufficient conditions that teaching or
schooling must fulfill before qualifying as educative. But of all the details of
one persons experiences, what could we find at the core of all of them that would
give us anything but the narrowest and most unrealistic concept of education?
The fourth strategy involves the use of a top-down synoptic approach. The first
step of this approach would involve downloading the central tenets of a specific
school of educational philosophy (say, idealism, realism, existentialism), or
educational psychology (behaviorism, social learning theory, and the like), or a
specific educational philosopher (John Dewey Maxine Greene, Paulo Freire). In the
second step, the writer attempts to explain education (or music education) in terms
of whatever theory he or she chose to download. This strategy frees the writer
from the hard work of building a critically reasoned concept of education through
conceptual analysis, historical understandings, and creative concept building by
drawing from a variety of perspectives.
In recent times, many postmodern educational philosophers (and a few music
education philosophers) have revived this tradition by downloading the views of one
or more theorists (prominently, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre-Flix
Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren) and then conceptualizing
education (and music education) through the lens offrom the perspective of
their selected theorist.
In several instances, this strategy has contributed significantly to deepening and
broadening the philosophy of education and music education. But the practical
relevance of this work is less evident in everyday teaching and learning.
Often, postmodern theorists central concern is to highlight, explain, and remedy
the ways in which traditional pedagogies and curricula can embody and perpetuate
abuses of power, race, gender, and social justice. These are deeply important
issues that past educational philosophyand past music education scholarshave
largely
, -Jed to examine. But in terms of philosophical method, the difficulty of
exploring ^ topic from the perspective of one theorist or theory (Freire,
Lyotard, Derrida) is diat each perspective has its own theoretical and normative
blind spots. Thus, fram- 'r>g a concept of music education through the lens of
(say) critical pedagogy or oStstructuralism causes lens-philosophers to overlook
what their chosen theory joes not say or what critics say about the limits of their
vision. For example, when jjiusic educators discuss critical pedagogy, they rarely
include critical perspectives n critical pedagogy and critical pedagogues. But of
course, the same problems arise in basing a concept of education or music education
on the work of any single
theorist.
Consequently, as Dewey advises, the preferable starting point for developing a
philosophical concept of education is a bottom-up approach of wide and deep
critical reflection. He also believed we should consider past and present
perspectives on education or any related fields that expand our understanding of
education: Dewey, says David Hildebrand, proposes that philosophers avoid
prejudicial frameworks and assumptions.45 Additionally, Dewey suggests that
philosophy seek greater coherence with life as experienced... Thus, this
practical starting point is more than a strategy for doing philosophy; it is the
profound and consequential acknowledgement that philosophys inquiries are similar
to many others; done by particular people, with particular perspectives, at a
definite time and place, with consequences : that must be considered.46
Indeed, some of Deweys educational themes and priorities echo those of several
scholars who preceded and surrounded him. And he relied on experienced teachers
mostly womenat the University of Chicago Lab School, which he established in
1896, to put his theoretical concepts of education into practice.47 Interestingly,
the principal of the Lab School was Deweys wife, Harriet Alice Chipman Dewey. As
Dewey said after her death, it was Alice who pushed him out of his ivory- tower
philosophizing and into the practical world and the ethical challenges of everyday
life and education: My wife used to say quite truly that I go at things from the
back end. Im hampered by too much technical absorption.48
5. STAGE THREE: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Long before the domain of educational philosophy was formally established,
philosophers and teachers debated most of the questions, problems, and challenges
we face today; What is education? What is education for? What is knowledge, and
what kinds of knowledge should children and adolescents learn? Who should be
taught? How should teachers teach, and how do students learn best? To what degree
should politicians and policy makers determine the form and content of a nations
educational system?
The aims and scope of this section are necessarily limited. Since educational
philosophy has an exceedingly long and complex history, its impossible to provide
a comprehensive and equitable accounting of this broad and deep literature. Indeed,
consider this sample of brilliant thinkers (in no particular order) whove made
major contributions to the history and advancement of Western educational
philosophy in the last two millennia: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, John Dewey,
Joseph Dunne,
Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, Marie de Gournay, Jrgen Habermas, Georg Hegej j
Chris Higgins, Paul Hirst, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Locke, Mary Leach, Jeam I
Franois Lyotard, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jane Roland Martin, John Stuart Mill, NeJ
Noddings, David Carr, Karl Marx, Martha Nussbaum, R. S. Peters, Friedrich Frobel
John Rawls, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sara Ruddick, Israel Scheffler, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Since this book isnt an encyclopedia of education, well summarize
viewpoints that are both implicit in and helpful to a praxial concept of music
education that were working to build in this and succeeding chapters.
Before beginning with the seminal ideas of select philosophers past and present,
well discuss how the earliest forms of education might have evolved and how this
teaching and lerning likely included an ethic of care and learning to care. WeU
follow this with a brief consideration of education from ancient China and India.
To survive and develop, our prehistoric ancestors must have engaged for thou-sands
of generations in one or more forms of spontaneous, imitative, nonformal, or
informal teaching and learning. Because these kinds of teaching and learning
dont require significant deliberation or planning, we can speculate that
observing, imitating, and modeling were probably the means our ancestors used to
pass basic survival skills to their offspring. As our species evolved, rituals and
more deliberative modes of communicating practical know-how and social norms would
likely have developed and improved peoples chances of survival and development. If
so, then particular in-dividuals or groups within communitieswise elders,
spiritual leaders, chiefs, crafts-men, deliberative thinkersmust have become more
common, more inclined, and more adept at sharing their knowledge and customs with
the young.49
And here, we wish to add evidence of something more poignant, more intersub-
jective, something that contemporary feminist theorists and educators call an
ethic of care, which should be part of all forms of education and living. Very
recent research from the new field of bioarchaeology affirms that at least some
prehistoric individuals and communities possessed an ethic of care: they acted
deliberately to care for the sick and disabled in their midst. From her examination
of prehistoric skeletons at many archaeological sites, Lorna Tilley and her
colleagues at the Australian National University found about 30 cases in which the
disease or pathology [of individuals] was so severe, they must have had care in
order to survive.50 Tilley continues: I am totally confident that there are
almost any number of case studies where direct support or accommodation was
necessary51 and was intentionally made available. These cases include a male
(designated Shanidar 1) found at a gravesite in Iraq dating to 45,000 years ago,
who died around age 50 with one arm amputated, loss of vision in one eye and other
injuries.52 Another is the Windover boy from about 7,500 years ago... who had a
severe congenital spinal malformation known as spina bifida, and lived to around
age 15.53 Bioarcheologists conclude that contrary to popular stereotypes of
prehistoric people, there is evidence in these and other instances of anlability
and willingness to help and sustain the chronically ill and handicapped!54 \
A third example is an eighteen-year-old female skeleton found at a site on the
Arabian Peninsula that dates back four thousand years. Analyses indicate she
suffered from something similar to polio: Her condition likely made it difficult
for her to walk . . . She had exceedingly thin arm and leg bones with very little
buildup of
fmal muscle attachments. She probably received round-the-clock care.55 MoreoVer,
her teeth were full of cavities and there was abscesses and periodontal disease,
pebra Martin, a professor of biological anthropology, suggests that those who cared
for the young woman may have been too kind ... Her people grew dates, and, per-
j^ps to make her happy, they fed her a lot of sticky, gummy dates, which eventually
. st rotted her teeth out, [which was] unusual for someone so young.56 ^
Considering the likelihood that our ancestors lived in harsh conditions of one sort
or another, and were susceptible to numerous diseases and accidents they had n0
means of curing, many of our ancestors would have needed direct support comparable
to short- and long-term assistance and nursing, which they furnished.
In summary, theres considerable and accumulating evidence dating back thousands
of years that some of our forebears treated each other (deliberately or
unconsciously) with compassion, empathy, an understanding of each others
limitations and needs, and, very likely, an ethic of care and love. In short,
empathy, an ethic of care, including a motivation to ease others suffering, was
extant in some of the earliest human communities. Its also possible that these
acts of short- and long-term care were not random but learned through observation,
modeling, and rituals, and eventually through norms of social-community living.
Moving to a completely different time and place, we observe that inculcating the
civic and social duties57 with and for students was a large part of ancient Indian
educational aims. In those times, Indian thinkers felt that an education helped to
foster self-knowledge in relation to an understanding of the world. Accordingly,
without a deep understanding of ones relationship with nature, with ideas, with
fellow human beings, with society, and with a deep respect for all life, one is not
really educated.58
During the Vedic era in India (from roughly 1700 BCE to 500 BCE), sages and gurus
interpreted and taught the meanings of the four Vedas (a large body of early
Sanskrit literature and Hindu scriptures) to young men and women of high-ranking
families, who were obliged to memorize the material and participate in related and
reinforcing rituals. In addition, gurus taught metrics, elementary grammar, and
etymology, in return for the students mundane services. This education was
extrainstitutional and closed to people of low status before the end of the Vedic
period.59 The pedagogies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hindu teachers
continue to echo an idealized Vedic model.
In ancient China during the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BCE to 256 BCE), schools were
established primarily for the sons of aristocrats: Traditional female education in
China included moral instruction, housework training, and literary education was a
"privilege of the [female] elite.60 During this dynasty, Confucius (551-479 BCE)
led most of the philosophical discourse on education. He held that the key to
understanding any subject rested in long and careful study and reflection. At the
same time, he warned against excessive contemplation and meditation: Study, for
Confucius, means finding a good teacher and imitating his words and deeds. A good
teacher is someone older who is familiar with the ways of the past and the
practices of the ancients.61
Confucius himself is credited by having taught altogether three thousand
students, though only seventy are said to have mastered the values he
cherished.62 It has
been noted that Confucius had what we would call an open-door policy to education.
Indeed, he was willing to teach anyone, thus challenging social and class
distinctions. Prior to Confucius, education was something gifted to nobility. As
such, Chinese scholars note that by teaching the masses Confucius paved the way to
a socially just philosophy of education.63
Confucius taught his students morality, proper speech, history and government, as
well as the six arts (ceremonies or ritual, music, archery, charioteering, the
study of characters or language, and arithmetic).64 Regardless of content,
Confucius determined that the twin pillars of education should be moral
instruction, which would have priority, and the imparting of knowledge.65 Still,
teaching and learning not only impart knowledge; they serve as a model of such
values and understandings. For Confucius, the teacher must be and live what he or
she teaches.
Lets continue our survey of philosophers constructs of education. Well discuss
select Greek philosophers of education, then jump ahead to sixteenth-century Europe
and more current thinkers and scholars contributions to educational philosophy.
Socrates (469-399 BCE)
In Platos Republic, Socrates probes the concepts of justice, happiness, well-
being, and the good life toward a policy for an ideal state in which educated and
just citizens would live productively, virtuously, and harmoniously.
For Socrates, the ideal society involved three strata of citizens: artisans, public
authorities and warriors, and leaders or guardians. In his view, men and women
should receive the same education in the same subjects as preparation for the same
functions and political roles in society, a radical declaration for his time. As a
teacher, Socrates mission was to develop the critical-thinking abilities and
skeptical dispositions of his pupils and fellow citizens. He sought to prepare and
motivate citizens to identify and correct illogical arguments and challenge
unethical ideologies with the goal of creating lives of virtue for themselves and
others.66 But Socrates did not focus on social-political problems alone. He was
equally concerned with community issues that demand self-reflection, self-
criticism, and self-knowledge. His famous maxim, Know thyself, is still admired
by most thoughtful people today.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, formal and informal school and community
educators still use the Socratic method, with or without skill and sensitivity,
depending on their understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. In a typical
Socratic dialogue, a teacher begins by asking a student (or a group of students) a
seemingly straightforward question, such as What is happiness? or What is music?
After a student answers, the teacher attempts to refine her students thinking by
asking a series of increasingly subtle questions, and imparting useful information
and ideas as needed to prompt the student(s) to formulate ever more reasonable and
refined answers. The dialogue continues until the teacher and/or student goes as
deeply as possible, or reaches the limit of their dialogical energy. Used
intelligently and ethically, the Socratic method can be highly constructive and
enjoyable.
The weakness of this method, however, lies in Socrates unrelenting pressure and
skepticism to unpack the meanings of the biggest issues of social life. So theres
an implicit negativism in this form of inquiry. When the Socratic method is applied
too rigorously, without concern for students personal feelings and contributions,
jt undercuts efforts to engage students in transformative dialogue. If misused, its
jllSt another formal, top-down, authoritarian, one-way, undemocratic process that
jeaves students feeling disrespected, shredded, discouraged, and small. Thus,
says yfoddings, professional teachers should ask themselves
whether the Socratic method can be used in modern classrooms as Socrates used it...
whether Socrates himself always used it in ways you find appropriate. Did he show
proper respect for the dignity of his students? Did he occasionally force opinions
on them (or seem to)? Is it right (in what sense of right?) to cross-examine a
student relentlessly in front of his peers?67
Plato (429-347 BCE)
Education is one of Platos major concerns, and music education is a primary focus
in his concept of educational theory. In the Laws, Plato states repeatedly that
education is the first and the fairest thing that the best of men can ever
have.68 In the Republic, which is largely a treatise on the nature and values of
education, he writes that education should aim to develop a passionate disposition
to be a just and ideal citizen.
In Platos conception of the ideal state, education should produce students who are
both self-actualized and able to contribute to society according to their
particular skills and abilities, especially as guardians of various kinds,
including warriors, military leaders, civil servants, and rulers. However, Platos
sense of self-actualization is not what most people mean today.69 Though he
believed all children should be given educational opportunities to develop their
abilities, he did not believe all children deserved a full and balanced education
toward the realization of their individual goals and creativity. Instead, his
functional concept of education centers on preparing students for specific social
roles and jobs. Only certain studentsthose who had the leisure time, intellectual
abilities, and dispositions to think and study deeply throughout lifeshould have
access to an education that would enable them to achieve the good life70 and
attain the highest levels of leadership. Moreover, he believed an ideal state could
exist only if highly educated philosophers were made kings, or kings were
discerning philosophers.
Platos concept of education traces to his belief that communities can survive and
thrive only if citizens develop specialized forms of craftsmanship that contribute
to the communitys needs. His system was designed to distinguish among future
citizens whose functions will differ and to provide training appropriate to the
abilities of each.71 Still, he did not see justice as the exclusive possession of
any single class of citizens, but something that emerged from harmonious
interactions among all components of society.72
Platos concept of education has strengths and weaknesses. Noddings and other
scholars object to his claim that there are educationally significant differences
among children,73 that not all children can or should learn fully. This is a view
that blocks equitable access to education and the possibility of equal outcomes for
all. Indeed, Platos singular concept of the good life, and his belief that only a
privileged layer of society could attain the good life, is ingrained in todays
marketplace policy takers and educators who conceive the good life in terms of
financial success and social privilege.
Reading Plato, it may seem that he was unconcerned with the education 0f | women in
general; only a small privileged class was educated. This is a controversial 1
point. From one perspective, he was far ahead of his time because he rejected the ;
common belief that men were superior to women. He saw no difference between the
ability of men and women to make reasonable judgments. Thus, writes NoddingS]
Plato maintained that prospective guardians, both male and female, should receive
the same education and be assigned to the same vital functions within the
society.^
Still, the feminist philosopher Jane Roland Martin objects that his concept of
education fails to make a place for an ethic of carecare for children, family
life, the aged, and so on.75 More specifically, although Plato viewed women as
eligible to be guardians, he privileged the abilities that men demonstrated in
public leadership rolesto become a guardian, a woman had to become like a man.76
He believed that only some very talented women could achieve these abilities.
Noddings and Martin expand their criticisms of Plato to include the fact that he
scorned the vital competencies women traditionally performed (and still do)
without recognition, such as maintaining a household, bearing and raising
children, caring for extended family, and so on. Noddings and Martin argue that
todays curriculum should educate males and females for care-work in relation to
each other, the environment as a whole, and themselves.77
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
As part of developing his concept of education, Aristotle studied the governing
prin-ciples of more than 250 Greek states. (Beginning in 750 BCE, Greece
experienced 250 years of expansion during which hundreds of individual states and
colonies developed in all directions; the combined population grew from
approximately 800,000 to 13 million.) From his political and philosophical
investigations, Aristotle concluded that the state is the core social entity and
that its prime concern should be to educate intelligent, civically engaged,
ethical, and happy citizens.78 At the heart of Aristotles concept of the good life
is the belief that every community shall have as its ultimate goal the attainment
of happiness; and that city is best governed which provides the greatest
opportunity for its attainment.79 Recall our earlier distinction (see Chapter 1)
between two interlocking meanings of happiness: as a persons subjective
experiences of pleasure and positive affect, and happiness in the fuller
Aristotelian eudaimonic sense of striving to live a productive, meaningful,
ethical, and community-oriented way of life that benefits oneself and others.
Aristotle followed Plato in the belief that children should be educated for their
productive responsibilities in community life. At the same time, he believed that
children should engage in guided activities that would develop the proper
virtues in the processes of learning specific skills and understandings.80
Educators and society should continuously revisit the meaning of human flourishing
and the best ways for helping students achieve a eudaimonic way of life. To
Aristotle, this meant providing a balanced curriculum for the whole child. Play,
debate, music, physical activities, and the study of science and philosophy were
necessary for the proper formation of the body, mind, and soul. Aristotle
emphasized the need to balance theoretical and practical reasoning (theoria and
phronesis). Like Plato, Aristotle believed learning should continue throughout
lifelong study, critically reflective actions, interpersonal
lationships> and civic engagement, but with emphases that change with age.81 As (C
ll see, these beliefs are also at the core of John Deweys philosophy.
^ Finally, in his school (the Lyceum), Aristotle engaged in what many of todays
sic educators refer to enthusiastically as informal education. He exemplified the
y logical friendliness, warmth, and goodwill that mark the kind of transformative
upil-teacher relationships that the majority of todays scholars and teachers value
so highly- And he emphasized the importance of peoples enjoyable engagement in
worthy forms of leisure, especially music.82
Aristotles concept of education is not perfect. It contains several serious flaws.
First among them is his unforgivable misogyny. As the feminist philosopher Cynthia
Freeland writes: Aristotle says that the courage of a man lies in commanding; a
womans lies in obeying;... [Aristotle says] that a female is an incomplete male
or as it were, a deformity and that a woman is perhaps an inferior being.83 Of
course, Aristotle is not alone. Kant and Hegel were also guilty of misogynist
thinking.
Still, and considering what weve highlighted in this brief overview of Aristotles
work, is it possible to argue that the majority of his contributions are valuable?
Yes. Although he held an unacceptable view of women and their abilities (as did
most Athenians), copious evidence during the last twenty-five hundred years
supports the claim that the vast majority of his work is astonishingly brilliant,
if not priceless. It represents one of the cornerstones of Western intellectual
history.
Marie Le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645)
Theres a tendency to assume that womens contributions to the field of educational
philosophy are a relatively recent development. This is largely accurate. As Mary
Leach observes,84 until the mid-1980s in the United States (and other nations), the
practice and content of educational philosophy, and Western philosophy in general,
was male-dominated and male-biased. Fortunately, this situation has changed
gradually during the last thirty years or so. Today, there are many female
luminaries (consider Maxine Greene, Jane Roland Martin, Nel Noddings, bell hooks,
and Susan Laird, to name only a few).
What is not widely known, however, is that several unacknowledged women made
exceptional contributions thousands of years ago to the foundations of educational
philosophy. Todays feminist philosophers are rediscovering and celebrating their
predecessors contributions.
To cite only one example from a few hundred years ago, lets consider Marie Le Jars
de Gournay. A French Renaissance intellectual, Marie de Gournay is best known for
her work on moral philosophy, social criticism, and education, especially her
defense of equal access to education and public office for men and women. Two of
her most celebrated books, Equality Between Men and Women (1622) and Complaint of
Ladies (1626), unpack and attack the misogyny of her era. She argues forcefully
that the denigration and subordination of women arises mainly from her societys
failure to provide equal access to education and to public leadership roles.
If the ladies arrive less frequently to the heights of excellence than do the
gentle-men, it is because of this lack of good education. It is sometimes due to
the negative attitude of the teacher and nothing more. Women should not permit
this to weaken their belief that they can achieve anything.85
Gournay builds her case for equal educational opportunity on Platos work, among
others (e.g., Cicero, Plutarch, Boccaccio, Tasso, and Erasmus): Plato, to whom no
one denies the title of divine, assigns them [women] the same rights, faculties,
anq functions in the Republic,86 In her educational philosophy, which focuses on
chan acter development, young people acquire ethical qualities and habits (among
them dispositions of justice, courage, honesty, leadership, courtesy, diligence,
dip[0^ macy, good judgment, and restraint) through diligent study, practice, and
observations of ethical adults. She writes that successful education depends to a
great extent on the moral character of those chosen as teachers . . . extraordinary
care must be exercised in the choice of governors, teachers, and tutors. She adds
that art must build on nature in developing the moral character of the pupil,
because the adults exercise of freedom will be shaped by the moral dispositions
encouraged in early age.87
Although her work was highly regarded by a large and educated public during her
era, it fell into obscurity Until the twentieth century when feminist scholars
began to spotlight the works of long-ignored female authors. As the philosopher
John Conley remarks: Gournays proto-feminist essays on gender equality
constituted the focus of this revival. In recent decades, they have become the
object of numerous editions, translations, and commentaries.88
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most significant intellectuals of the
eighteenth- century Enlightenment. He was a political and educational philosopher,
and a novelist, autobiographer, musician, music critic, and music theorist. He was
also an enthusiastic but rudimentarily educated composer, who used the librettos of
his operas to attack the French monarchy.89 His writings advanced liberal and
socialist theory and prepared his followers for success in the French Revolution.
In his celebrated novel Emile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau presents his
philosophy of education, which many twentieth-century educational philosophers have
praised. Indeed, some scholars believe Emile qualifies as the first and most com-
prehensive educational philosophy in Western culture: Perhaps no single volume,
with the exception of Platos Republic, has exerted as much influence in the
subsequent history of educational thought and practice as ... Emile.90
Emile is divided into five books that trace the development and education of a male
child, Emile. The fifth book outlines the education of Sophie, Emiles female
counterpart. Emile rests on Rousseaus belief that even though all children are
born good, their social-cultural experiences tend to corrupt their innate
goodness: God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become
evil.91 In Rousseaus narrative, Emile is educated so as to protect his innate
goodness, mean-ing he is raised, supported, and taught informally with little
restraint. He is not pressured to grow up too fast. He doesnt follow a set
curriculum. Emile directs his own education by learning only what interests him in
an unstructured context. He T- constructs his own knowledge and ethical
dispositions in stages through discovery
and experimentation. As Noddings writes: Emile was not to be pressured into
abstract thought or early book learning. He was to learn according to his own
interests
and through hands-on experience. Senses and feelings were primary; thought and
abstraction were to be at their service.92
Rousseaus ideal teacher must combine several qualifications. He must be informal,
sensitive, and nurturing. He does not force his own objectives on a student; nor
does he attempt to control his learning trajectory. But he must be able to
anticipate a students development and provide a tranquil, supportive environment.
To this point, it appears that Rousseaus concept of education is exemplary in many
ways. However, theres an ugly flaw in Rousseaus discussion of the education of
Sophie, Emiles soul mate. Here Rousseaus ideas are not only puzzling and
retrograde, theyre unforgivably misogynist. Rousseau argues that if woman is
made to please and to be in subjection to man, she ought to make herself pleasing
to his eyes and not provoke him ... her strength is in her charms.93 Whereas Emile
was educated to think independently and serve in public life, Sophie was taught to
be passive, subservient, and work at home.
Whereas Emile was taught to think for himself, Sophie was taught to guard her
reputation and do what convention prescribed. Whereas Emile was prepared for
responsible, public life, Sophie was confined to the home . . . Some argue that
Rousseau must be excused for his misogyny. After all, heas everyonewas a product
of a particular time and place. But in answer to this, we may note that Rousseau
was familiar with Plato and also with contemporary writing that considered women
equal to men.94
Indeed, recall our previous discussion of the French proto-feminist and educational
philosopher Marie de Gournay. Her writingspublished in France 140 years before
Emiledetailed and attacked the misogyny of her era and exposed the many ways her
society blocked womens access to education. In addition, Rousseaus philosophy was
severely attacked during his lifetime, especially by the eighteenth-century British
philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.
So, how shall we evaluate Rousseaus philosophy? On one hand, its deeply flawed.
On the other handwith regard to the educational strategies that contemporary
teachers need to consider carefully and apply appropriatelyits fair to say
Rousseaus philosophy was enlightened and far ahead of his time. Excluding his
objectionable claims, many of his ideas have been refined and applied (more and
less) by several major theorists and teachers, notably Johann Pestalozzi, Jean
Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and A. S. Neill, who based his
famous Summerhill School on Rousseaus principles. To Neill and many others,
children should learn through play, discovery, and exploration in the context of a
democratic-communal learning environment to which they freely contribute. Lastly,
we can see traces of Emile in some writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
Jonathan Kozol, Paulo Freire, and others.95
John Dewey (1859-1952)
John Dewey was one of the foremost American philosophers of the twentieth century
and ranks among the most extraordinary and prolific philosophers of any era. He
contributed deeply to the philosophy of education, mind, art, epistemology,
ethics, logic, science, psychology, social and political theory, and more. His
writings. are distinctive for how they seek practical solutions to real-world
problems by integrating insights from a wide range of research domains, thereby
erasing such traditional dualisms as philosophy and science, and art and ethics.
Education is central to Deweys thought. He believed education was the supreme
human interest in which ... other problems, cosmological, moral, logical, come to a
head.96 Thus he believed his philosophy of education summed up his entire philo-
sophical position. Given his fusion of the theoretical and pragmatic, Dewey
believed a full explanation of education must not only account for teaching-
learning processes, but also the experiential social-cultural contexts that make
education and democracy possible. Dewey conceived education as primarily a social
process, not an individual achievement.97
Dewey explained his concepts of education in numerous books, especially My
Pedagogic Creed, The School and Society, The Child and the Curriculum, Democracy
and Education, and Experience and Education. Technically, Deweys philosophy of
education (and all other issues) is called naturalist pragmatism (or naturalism,
for short). Simply put, naturalism views both human life and education from an
ecological perspective: our personal, biological, social, and cultural worlds
including the opportunities and problems they present to usactivate and inform our
processes of intelligence, knowing, learning, ethical habits, and growth. Human
social experience comprises adaptive courses of action, habits, active functions,
[and] connections.98 Human experience and education are tied up with meaning, and
meaning is by its nature social and pragmatic.99 Dewey believed that we must think
of life and learning pragmatically, as life-in-action, learning-in-action, and
education for social transformation.
Before we move on, lets briefly explain Deweys notion of habits: The essence of
habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular
acts.100 But this is not all: All habits are demands for certain kinds of
activity; and they constitute the self.101 Additionally, habits are learned,
social, and cultural con-structions that help us engage in associated living.102
As such, habits inform our ways of being in the world and with the world.
From this naturalist perspective, people are natural organisms transacting with
the natural environment, taking advantage of our cultural tools in anticipating and
controlling its complex events. Thus, culture is continuous with other parts of
nature: sociocultural life forms do not introduce any hard boundaries within
existence.103 Put another way, knowing is a lifelong process that emerges from
practical, social, cooperative, and intersubjective experiences, not theoretical
reflections alone. Indeed, Dewey once remarked that instead of calling one of his
books Experience and Nature, he should have titled it Culture and Nature.m
With this background in mind, its easier to understand why Dewey argued that
education is principally a matter of facilitating students growth and renewal and
that the outcome of students growth is more growth. Life and education are
meaningful so long as they remain continuously active, broader, and deeper
processes. Dewey insisted that teaching and learning are educative only if students
leave formal and informal educational contexts more prepared and motivated to
engage in new and future experiences.
f he process of growth, of improvement and progress, rather than the static out-
corne and result, becomes the significant thing... The end is no longer a terminus
or limit to be reached. It is the active process of transforming the existent
situation- Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of
perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living. Honesty, industry, temperance,
justice, like health, wealth, and learning, are not goods to be possessed as they
would be if they expressed fixed ends to be attained. They are directions of change
in the quality of experience. Growth is the only moral end.105
pewey emphasized the difference between his concept of education and the nature of
schooling- He worried that schooling frequently and systematically sacrifices
students lives and interests to fixed ends, to curricular aims that exist
abstractly, somewhere out there in some far-distant future beyond students
current motivations, pewey didnt deny the importance of aims in education. His
point was that our aims and objectives should not be fixed. Following Dewey,
Noddings emphasizes there is no grand, ultimate aim beyond continued education. As
long as a particular aim functions adequately to guide our activity, we retain it.
When it fails to give such guidance, we abandon it and substitute another, more
relevant aim.106
How can we adequately summarize the educational implications of Deweys naturalism?
Lets consider five points. First, to be truly educative, music teaching and
learning activities and experiences should be integrated with students prior
experiences and teachers considerations of where any given teaching or learning
situation may lead students as members of social groups. Thus, teachers must
understand their students as persons who are in and of the world and, on this
basis, plan future experiences designed to develop their growth toward broader and
deeper abilities and understandings in each subject domain.
At the same time, Deweys philosophy sounds this warning to teachers: be wary of
trusting scholars, curriculum specialists, and policy makers who wish to design
curricula for all students everywhere and force teachers to align their teaching
with the logical structure of subjects. Doing so is not pedagogically
adequate.107 Deweys words foreshadowed the tragic circumstances of todays
neoliberal policies. Moreover, Dewey might be seen as an early postmodernist
insofar as he considered any search for certaintyincluding a search for the
truth of any subject matter and for best educational practicesas futile. Music
education philosopher Lauri Vkev summarizes Deweys viewpoint this way: "To be
successful, philosophy [and a wise educational philosophy], like other disciplines,
has to deal with the messy, contingent, flickering, empirical, and pragmatic
subject matter of experience. Thus, it is as fallible as other realms of empirical
inquiry.108 So even though there must be continuity in experience,109 says
Dewey, education must be a personal-social, democratic, and flexible endeavor that
puts students growth, personhood, and welfare at the center.
This does not mean Dewey wanted to abandon the traditional subjects of the
curriculum; instead, he wanted subjects to be taught so as to connect students and
subjects to real-world, social-democratic problems. Subjectsincluding the arts
should be presented so that students can use them in purposefully working through
some problematic situation ... Curriculum, for Dewey, is not a body of material es-
tablished before instruction. Instead, it is the material gathered, used, and
constructed [by each student himself or herself] during instruction and
inquiry110 and,
of course, inside and outside the classroom. In other words, theres nothing wrong.
with educative classroom learning, but we may learn the most-including some of 1
the most important things in lifewhen we learn on our own.
If Dewey were alive today, hed be in the forefront of American educators fight. J
ing for the preservation and improvement of the public school system and against '
neoliberal policy makers who wish to make education a business, or outsource
education to semiprivate charter schools (in the United States), or promote misedu-
cative, business-based teaching and assessment methods. As Daniel Tanner, a cur.
riculum theorist, says, Dewey was completely opposed to any effort to undermine
universal public education.1 He believed mass education was superior to any type
of selective education because an inclusive system of public education provides
more opportunity for social improvement and democracy, and it dissolves the
traditional dualism between the cultural and the vocational and between a leisure
class and a working class.112 In Democracy and Education, Dewey emphasizes that
the public school curriculum must reflect and connect with democratic ideals and
practicalities.
The second implication of Deweys naturalism is that students must be actively
engaged in the topics of their study. If students arent invested in learning
materials chosen by the teacher, they lose interest and confidence; they cease to
be involved in personal and social meaning making. Dewey believed education should
pivot on four basic interests of children: making things (construction), finding
out (inquiry), expressing themselves [including expressing themselves
artistically], and communi-cating.113 To create an educative environment, Dewey
insisted that students must be involved in deciding the aims of their own learning:
There is, I think, no point. . . which is sounder than its emphasis upon the par-
ticipation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his
activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional
education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in
construction of the purposes involved in his studying.114
This does not mean that Dewey supported child-study and child-centered movements.
He did not. These movements were the inventions of misinformed educators who
twisted the meaning of Deweys arguments about the necessity of including students
in deciding the purposes and aims of teaching-learning processes. Dewey was an
avowed interactionist, meaning he believed teachers and students should work
together in a democratic learning environment.
Educators (including some music educators) whose zeal exceeds their under-standing
of Deweys philosophy misunderstand his ideas. Dewey w;as opposed to engaging and
motivating students by devising situations where they merely amuse and entertain
themselves with whatever gives them pleasure in the moment, without any serious
guidahce or input from knowledgeable teachers.115 Dewey emphasized the need for
carefully planned curricula that would engage students in appropriate but
challenging pfoblem-solving projects that would stimulate and nourish their growth.
Dewey was very concerned that so-called child-centered educators were excluding
serious problem-solving projects and democratic dialogues in favor of soft
vjronments where children were free to determine the curriculum by and for
^selves: he held that nothing can be developed from nothing, for even a phi-
{ opher cannot spin a universe of truths out of his own mind, let alone a
child.116 wey believed that learning and growing together within a class community
should 0t be free in the negative and unproductive sense of freedom from
freedom from teachers> curricula, and disciplined inquirybut a positive freedom
to117 freedom to act, learn, grow, and interact in a mutually respectful and
productive oirtext of student-teacher problem solving and democratic, dialogical
exchange. As Lawrence Kimpton (an educational philosopher and past president of the
University 0f Chicago) reminds us, Dewey was a very rigorous thinker. Thus, he
believed the adjustments that we make to the problems arising in our experience
occur only through hard and active thinking.118
What this means is that for teachers to qualify as educative, ethical, and caring
educators, we must fulfill our teaching responsibilities to students in at least
two ways: by working with students as experienced, resourceful, empathetic, and
authoritative guides, not authoritarian taskmasters; and by working with and
alongside our students, which does not mean fading away to the point of granting
students complete responsibility for curricular and classroom supervision and
unrestrained freedom of action and speech.119 Deweys concept of educational
value meant that growth toward the good life depends on being endlessly
challenged : and endlessly dissatisfied with the limitations of the present. This
is how we grow
and stay alive.120 ' .
Note that Deweys emphasis on reasoning, inquiry, active thinking, and being
endlessly challenged does not mean he privileged thinking at the expense of
feeling. Recall that he was a severe critic of all forms of dualistic thinking, as
in thinking and feeling, as if these are two separate processes. As he says in
Human Nature and Conduct,
The conclusion is not that the emotional, passionate phase of action can or should
be eliminated in behalf of bloodless reason. More passions, not fewer, is the
answer. To check the influence of hate there must be sympathy, while to rationalize
sym-pathy there are needed emotions of curiosity, caution, respect for the freedom
of others ... Rationality ... is the attainment of a working harmony among diverse
desires.121
The third implication of Deweys naturalism emphasizes personal meaning, social
interaction, and the social construction of knowledge. Children dont begin their
journey toward ever-increasing growth with common values and understandings. They
construct them by combining their prior experiences with opportunities to solve
meaningful problems; This is knowledge in the pragmatic sense because it has real
effects, says Noddings.122 This requires that they have continuous opportunities
to inquire and communicate, instead of memorizing information or following
teachers orders.
The fourth implication of Deweys philosophy is that reflective thinking in and for
problem solving is a major unifying process in education. In How We Think, Dewey
argued that critically reflective thinking about problems arising from classroom
projects and communal life experiences is a primary means of student growth in
learning to inquire and construct solutions, which will always be contingent on
further inquiries and experiences.123 Reflective, independent thinking, and the
sociaR democratic construction of knowledge are the keys to mobilizing
intelligence.
Contemporary additions to Deweys basic strategies for developing critically re.
flective teaching and learning include simulated-recall, discourse analysis,
think-aloud protocols, personal journal writing, use of metaphors and other
techniques.124
The fifth implication of Deweys work is his premise that the continuity and
development of a democratic nation requires that schools, teaching and learning
processes, and curricula model democratic, associated living. Schools should be
conceptualized as mini-societies; This means students working together on common
problems, establishing rules by which their classroom will be governed, testing and
evaluating ideas for the improvement of classroom life and learning, and
participating [with teachers] in the construction of objectives for their own
learning.125 For Dewey, democracy, like personal growth, is not a thing, or a
nation, but a continuous process of critical reflection. For Dewey, democracy is a
way of life. Philosopher Charlene Haddock Seigfried states:
Socializing democracy requires more than developing intellectual competency and
technical skills in each new generation ... Schools ought to inculcate a social
vision. This means recognizing the meaning and realities of the social life of
which they are a part and developing the inner resources and skills to participate
fully and effectively in contributing to its further development. Persons should be
empowered, not just filled with facts or techniques, and should be able at the same
time to sympathize with the work and activities of others and to cooperate with
them in the carrying on of the common life.126
Despite his enormous contributions, critics see weaknesses in Deweys writings that
result from the fact that, like all philosophers before and since, Deweys vision
was limited by his historical and cultural circumstances. Some commentators argue
that he failed to give sufficient attention to the oppression and cultural hegemony
experienced by marginalized people in his own time and the potential evils of their
unfettered continuance. Also, his strong faith in science caused him to overlook
the possibility that, in addition to alleviating many social problems and enhancing
democratic engagement in many ways, science could also cause serious societal
problems. Lastly, his concept of democracy as a process involving cooperative
communities of like-minded people working together to solve problems has turned
out to be rather utopian. For example, he did nothe could notenvision the extent
to which todays corporate concentrations of national and global wealth, power, and
privilege would make reasonable negotiations impossible and tear apart the social
fabric of many nations.
Paulo Freire (1921-1997)
To situate the contributions of the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo
Freire, well begin with a brief summary of three important historical turns in
education, which is not to say that all of these turns were headed in justifiable
directions.127
First, John Herbart, a German philosopher and psychologist of the Enlightenment,
is associated with conceiving of education as a science. Notwithstanding Herbarts
concern for students moral character, his nineteenth-century approach
n developing childrens mental capacities by organizing and transmitting ^.^t-
rnatter knowledge according to its logical structure and chronology. De- ^ ding on
tlier so"called innate mental capacities, students, Herbart assumed, fn be capable
of and motivated to learn by thinking logically and doing related ^fcises- Herbart
viewed teachers as subject-matter authorities who dominated issroom transactions.
C Interestinglyand tragicallyvariations on Herbarts approach are alive and well
any schools worldwide. Knowingly or not, some music educators still teach music
bistory theory, music appreciation, and musical techniques this way. Even more
perniciously* neoliberalist education embraces many of Herbarts assumptions.
Enter John Dewey. His naturalist pragmatism was the catalyst and foundation for a
monumental revolution in education during the last decades of the nineteenth
century> the first half of the twentieth century, and beyond. Deweys philosophy
erases the dualisms (student and teacher; cognition and emotion; body and mind) and
obliterates the pseudo-scientific foundation of Herbarts concept of teaching and
learning. Recall that Deweys philosophy conceives students personhood and
education in ecological terms: students personal, biological, social, and cultural
worldsincluding the educational and problem-solving opportunities their worlds
presentactivate and inform their knowing, doing, learning, growth, ethical
development, and democratic dispositions. Dewey placed the democratic, student-
teacher relationship at the center of education.
Paulo Freires concept of critical pedagogy ignited, grounded, and guided a third
revolutionary turn in education. Although Freire accepted some of Deweys
concepts, he put much more emphasis on the social-political dimensions and
responsibilities of teaching and learning. Freire believed education should be
conceived and carried out as political action for human liberation from oppression
and social injustice. In the words of the cultural critic Henry Giroux (one of
Freires most celebrated followers), critical pedagogy is an educational
movement... to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize
authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take
constructive action.128 Richard Schaull, another Freirean scholar, contrasts
traditional education with critical pedagogy:
There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions
as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into
the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it [the traditional
paradigm], or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and
women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the
transformation of their world.129
To understand the origins, thrust, and development of Freires pedagogy of the op-
pressed, consider some details of his background. Although he was born into a
middle-class family in the Brazilian port of Recife, the financial repercussions of
the Great Depression in the 1930s drove his family into poverty. The deprivations
of his familys situation severely affected his ability to learn in school. Some of
his teachers 'diagnosed him as what was then termed mentally retarded: I didnt
understand anything because of my hunger. I wasnt dumb. It wasnt lack of
interest. My social condition didnt allow me to have an education. Experience
showed me . . . the
relationship between social class and knowledge.130 Growing up with other
destituje and hungry children and family members motivated Freire to dedicate
himself t0 transforming the lives of the poor, the marginalized, the politically
and economically oppressed, and the personally and socially abused.
Once his familys economic circumstances improved, Freire attended the Uni. versity
of Recife, where he studied philosophy and law. Afterward, he taught hig^ school,
where he began developing his celebrated Freirean approach to literacy edu. cation,
which evolved into a lifelong commitment to adult literacy education. Fje began
working with the poor of Recife, refined his approach, and eventually took it far
beyond. Indeed, Freires literacy programs enabled many hundreds of peasant farmers
to read for the purpose of activating their critical thinking and problem posing
about the social, economic, and political contexts of their lives, and for par.
ticipating as fully as possible in the gradual democratization of Brazil.131
Freire did not view reading as a simple matter of decoding text. Rather, he saw
reading as a process of apprehending power and causality in society and ones
location in it.132 Freire worked for emancipation and liberation of the oppressed
from below; he worked by means of grassroots, revolutionary educational processes
that empowered people to liberate themselves from colonial domination and thereby
restore their indigenous cultures. Freires form of education was eventually
applied in many nations, including European colonies in Africa, Grenada, and
Nicaragua.
In addition to the success of his grassroots literacy work, Freires philosophical
thinking (he was an expert on the works of Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Buber,
and others) was so incisive that it influenced scholarship in many other domains,
among them theology, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. In his
lifetime, his philosophical work and revolutionary pedagogical commitment led him
to accept positions at UNESCO, the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform (where he
wrote his seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970), Harvard, and the World
Council of Churches. In addition, he was a consultant to revolutionary governments
in South America and abroad.133
Freires philosophy has been held in high esteem by many Western educators and
scholars during the last forty years, including some music educators and CM
workers. Clearly, critical pedagogy pivots on mutual respect, trust, and
communion between the teacher who learns from her students and the student who
teaches his or her teacher and others. Freirean pedagogy emphasizes reciprocal,
teacher- student dialogues and a form of critical thinking called conscientization.
It seeks to raise students awareness of society as a problem that can be probed
and that must be transformed to achieve social justice.
The teacher is decentered. This does not mean the teacher fades completely into the
background or hides personal views from students. Teachers and students are co-
workers and co-researchers in deconstructing received wisdom, common sense, and the
lived experiences of the students.
Freire conceived of authentic teaching as enacting a clear authority, rather than
being authoritarian. The teacher, in his conception, is not neutral, but intervenes
in the educational situation in order to help the student to overcome those aspects
of his or her social constructs that are paralyzing, and to learn to think
critically...
fhe0i
sfI1pr0'blem posing and problematizingon unpacking and daring to interrogate not
* the strengths and weakness of an issue or situation, but the invisible networks
of 1 0tver and hegemony that cause injustice and inequality. Freires problem-
posing P nCept of education involves students in exploring their reality as a
problem to be
yansfbrmed.
Freires philosophy conceives liberation as a concrete social praxiscritical
reflection and action, action and critical reflectionthat unmasks and unpacks the
tructures that support domination and works to imagine and create revolutionary
change: To sPeak a true word, says Freire is to transform the world.135
Freire viewed banking education as a major impediment to student-teacher problem
posing, problematizing, and transformation. Banking education rests on the
assumption that students are merely passive objects and helpless empty heads. It
conditions students to believe that knowledge belongs to the oppressor, which, like
a gift, the teacher gives to or deposits in the student. But this so-called gift
of knowledge is a false gift, because it serves only to maintain the oppressors
domination of the oppressed. The banking process shuts down students analytic
abilities and imaginative capacities; it blocks their access to the critical-
conceptual tools, enlightened perspectives, motivation, and hope needed to
problematize and transform their life goals and social-political circumstances.
Freires work receives criticism from various directions. Some condemn his
emphasis on revolution and emancipation to overthrow the privileges of the status
quo and of what they consider a utopian dream. Others resist his debt to Christian
influences. Some postmodernists are uncomfortable with the universal tendencies in
his theorizing, and his presumed failure to account for the mutability of
oppression. For example, a teacher being oppressed by a fellow coworker can become
an oppressor at home. And some feminists argue that Freires writings are weakened
by his propensity for sexist language.
That said, Freire was continuously responsive to critiques of his work and made
strong efforts to amend its weaknesses and refine his arguments. In sum, theres no
doubt that his revolutionary philosophy has a crucial role to play in expanding and
refining previous concepts of education and music education in the pursuit of lib-
eratory aims and teaching and learning processes.
NelNoddings (1929-)
One of the most eminent educational philosophers of the twentieth- and twenty-first
centuries, Nel Noddings is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emerita, Stanford
Uni-versity. Prior to her work at Stanford, Noddings spent seventeen years as an
elementary and secondary school math teacher, administrator, and curriculum
supervisor in Public schools and served as director of the Laboratory Schools at
the University of Chicago. She is a past president of the National Academy of
Education, the Philosophy of Education Society, and the John Dewey Society. In
addition to numerous
booksamong them Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Educati0n Women
and Evil, The Challenge to Care in Schools, and Happiness and Education^ Noddings
has published more than two hundred articles and book chapters on a wiqe range of
topics, especially the ethics of care and democracy in education.
Philosophically, Noddings emphasizes the need to put three categories of concern
at the center of education: home, occupation, and civic life. Her arguments rest on
the belief that education and democracy are intimately connected because both are
matters of social interdependency and associated living. She echoes Deweys
Democracy and Education:
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of
associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of
the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer
his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give
point to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class,
race, and national territory which have kept men from perceiving the full import of
their activity.136
Noddings reinforces Deweys themes by arguing that a primary purpose of schooling
in a democratic society is to produce thoughtful citizens who can deliberate and
make wise choices.137 Noddings and Dewey share an ecological view of education as
a process that furnishes the optimal conditions for students growth through
equanimity and balance. If we value our democracy, says Noddings, we will
remember that it is perpetually a cooperative work under construction. So is
education. We have much to gain from a critical and appreciative appraisal of the
past and, perhaps even more, from a cooperative and imaginative exploration of the
future.138
To Noddings, balance is best understood and achieved through caring relationships
that students experience through four processesmodeling, dialogue, practice, and
confirmationall of which empower students to become better versions of
themselves. Modeling serves to demonstrate care: We do not care in order to
model caring; we model care by caring.139 Dialogue is open-ended insofar as the
care-er (the teacher) and the cared-for (students) work together to solve problems:
Even when dialogue does not result in a mutually acceptable solutionperhaps
especially when it does not do soit should end in a way that sustains the caring
relation.140
In a caring relationship, effective teachers allow students to practice both
natural and ethical caring. For this to be successful, a teacher must acknowledge
when a student is at his or her caring best: successful practice in caring depends
in the caring relation between master-carer and the one learning to care. One must
learn (consciously or unconsciously) what it means to be cared for before one can
learn to care for others.141 Confirmation points a person toward a better self...
Its aim is to bring out a better jself already present in potential, shadowy form.
The caring relation makes confirmation possible.142
Her emphasis; on moral education and care ethics traces to the work of Martin
Buber, among others. Rose Graf-Taylor summarizes the links between care ethics,
feminist scholarship, and Bubers work, which echoes an important theme in our .
praxial concept of personhood and education: We become who we are in relation
, 0thers. There is no isolated entity called a human being, no I taken in itself
1puber saYs ln 1 and Thou1*3]. There are only persons-in-relation"lu Graf-Taylor
Wes:
psychology has focused on individuals and, following the subject-object split,
treated their relatedness as an external factor ... the feminist approach goes a
decisive step further in its attempt to understand the connectedness of human
life.1'15
if rewriting the opening line of the Old Testament, Buber (1970) says: In the
begin- A* - is relation.146 He continues: For the inmost growth of the self is
not accomplished, as people like to suppose to-day, in mans relation to himself,
but... in the ^ aking Present f another self and in the knowledge that one is made
present in his 0wn self by the other.147 In terms of teaching, Buber proposes the
educator must try to live through the situation in all its aspects not only from
his point of view but also from that of his partner. He must practice the kind of
realization that I call embracing. It is essential that he should awaken the I-You
relationship in the pupil, too.148
Noddings elaborates on the role of the teacher in this regard: The teacher, as
0ne-caring, meets the student directly but not equally. Buber says that the teacher
is capable ofinclusion, and this term seems to describe accurately what the one-
caring does in trying to teach the cared-for... In inclusion, the teacher
receives the student and becomes in effect a duality.149 She adds that working
together . . . produces both joy in the relation and increasing competence in the
cared-for.150 In other words, the teachers world is in some way glorified and
gratified in the caring relation: The one-caring as teacher, then, has two major
tasks: to stretch the students world by presenting an effective selection of that
world with which she is in contact, and to work cooperatively with the student in
his struggle toward competence in that world.151 A caring relationship emerges
when we take responsibility for and attend to the needs of the other, when we
perceive persons in purely individualistic terms, but as relational and
interdependent beings.
Noddings argues that the care-er seeks out the needs of the cared-for. Both roles
(care-er, cared-for) are equally important. Without recognition by the cared-for,
the caring relation is incomplete: How good I can be is partly a function of how
youthe otherreceive and respond to me. Whatever virtue I exercise is completed,
fulfilled, in you. The primary aim of all education must be nurturance of the
ethical ideal.152 Her prioritization of an ethic of care should be understood as
another example (following Dewey, Freire, and others) of facilitating
simultaneously the fullest growth of peoples (students) personhood and their
subject-matter understandings. She is not decentering cognitive, emotional,
artistic, corporeal, or any other kind of development. Rather, Noddings is
emphasizing that to the extent teachers focus exclusively on subject-matter
content and skills (historical facts, music theory concepts, musical skills, etc.)
teachers will marginalize or eliminate the social-cultural dimensions of personal
growth, intersubjectivity, and subject-matter knowledge, including the ethical
dimensions of music education. This causes us to recall Deweys argument: the arts
should not be separated from everyday lifeplaced on an aesthetic pedestal for
the contemplation of so-called aesthetic qualities.153 Instead, the arts should be
integrated with all aspects of personal and community life, including the ethical
dimensions of everyday life.
6. STAGE FOUR: EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL PRAXIS
In previous stages of this chapter, we stated our reasons for rejecting many common
sense notions and narrow or incomplete definitions of education. We also explain^
our opposition to neoliberal concepts of education. (More on the practical
consequences of neoliberalism toward the end of the book.)
Heres a short list of notions, definitions, and concepts we reject as inadequate
in one way or another, or simply wrong:
Education is the knowledge accumulated, or that must be accumulated, by students
after they study content areas in school.
Education is the development of skills, knowledge, and self-discipline.
Education is the process of cultural transmission.
Education is the development of autonomous and creative thinkers.
Education is the process of preparing students to earn a living.
(Lastly, the neoliberal notion:) Education is the process of preparing
students for the needs of global corporations and for success in free-market
economies
In addition, we were especially critical of the ideology of neoliberalism and its
offspring: marketplace educational reform. The latter conceives education as
nothing more than (to quote Mun Tsang again) a production process in which inputs
(such as students, teachers, and textbooks) are combined to yield desired outputs
(such as student learning)154learning in the reductionist sense of preparing
workers and consumers for the global marketplace. From this neoliberal perspective,
schools and universities are businesses and should be operated and evaluated as
such.
Thus, neoliberal, marketplace policy makers are not only opposed to school
curricula that include and waste money on that which does not contribute directly
to preparation for unfettered participation in free market economiesi.e., music,
visual art, dance, poetry, physical educationthey seek to exclude the development
of learners knowledge of and positive dispositions toward active engagement in
democratic citizenship, social justice, interpersonal care, empathy, and social
agency. In the words of David Carr, cited earlier, any society or state that takes
such a severe, either-or position on educationeither education for making a living
or education for making a life+~~is irresponsible,155 to put it mildly.
So, if simple-minded, one-sided, and neoliberal concepts of education are deeply
flawed in numerous ways, what alternatives do we have? The answer we propose for
your consideration is that education should be conceived and carried out as a
social praxis. We suggest that the concept and application of education as a
social praxis is sufficiently broad and deep to accommodate the logical and
defensible arguments of the majority of eminent philosophers examined in this
chapter and our own beliefs about the natures and values of music and education as
social praxes.
A social-praxis concept of education insists on the necessity of a holistic,
balanced, ethical, infersubjective, and communal concept of education, learning,
teaching, and schooling. Education and music education as social praxes aim to
motivate peoples active engagement and creativity in as many aspects of musics as
possible, as well as all aspects of musical-cultural-social life, toward personal
and communal flourishingflourishing in all the senses weve explained up to this
point and that
and schooling from the grips of narrow thinkers and marketplace forces, its
caW"al ^at educative and ethical teachers and communities grasp, explain, and Cftl
k phticaHy to ensure that schooling focuses on much more than the acquisition
racy, numeracy, technological twenty-first-century skills, and so forth. To the
tent that these forms of knowing are taught educatively, they are necessary to ,C
r and greater degrees. But theyre not nearly enough. For one thing, as education 1
fessor and cultural critic Neil Postman writes, new technology can never substi-
for human values.156
Worldwide, human cultures past and present pursue a fairly common set of life
als157 or hfe Vdues> including the goods and values endorsed by the greatest
fbinkers 111 human history, including most educational scholars examined in this
chapter: freedm health and well-being, happiness, enjoyment, fellowship,
intellectual stimulation and engagement, wisdom, self-identity, and self-esteem
(for oneself and others). These values hold a central place in the worlds
philosophic traditions and in the minds of most people young and old. The point,
says educational philosopher Clive Beck, is that what these life goals have in
common is that people seldom ask, Why do you want. .. freedom, health and well-
being, happiness, enjoyment, and fellowship?158
A social praxis concept of education, learning, teaching, schooling, and
facilitating argues that all school subjects, experiences, aims, and attainments
ought to be conceived in terms of their relationships to life goals and life
values. Education, educational institutions, teachers, artist-teachers, music
therapists, community workers, and music educators should empower learners to
achieve life goals in school and beyond schoolin working life, family life, and
social life.159 Properly conceived, education and schooling are for flourishing in
life, now and in the future.
Truly educative teachers and administrators are those who plan, carry out, and
justify their school curricula in relation to the attainment of life goals, not in
relation to restricted notions of teaching and testing and neoliberal concepts of
education. Educative teachers must work as hard as possible to resist and subvert
the latter on behalf of learners and for the furtherance of democratic and socially
just societies; educative teaching should include the dispositions and abilities to
teach as a subversive activity160 that pivots on many attributes we praised in
our discussion of the need for teachers to continuously do philosophy, which
includes critically reflective, skeptical, and compassionate thinking and doing.
Alfie Kohn, a widely published critic of neoliberalism and its disastrous effects
on education, endorses the need for teachers to persevereto find the energy to
stay critically reflective and subversive. He argues that, painful as it may be to
say so, even the most dedicated teachers can become so weary of public criticism
and the daily grind of teaching that they let down their guard and cease to be
skeptical and reflective. When this happens, says Kohn, teachers become
content to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted
assumptionseven when they dont make sense. Conversely, too many educators

seem to have lost their capacity to be outraged by outrageous things. Handed

foolish and destructive mandates, they respond only by requesting guidance on how
to implement them.161
But what do tenacious and courageous educators do? They dig deeper, they ques, tion
so-called evidence, they interrogate what seems obvious, and they engage their
students and parents in doing the same. Being a tenacious and critical educator (at
any level) means that one has the gumption to follow ones principles wherever
they lead.162
One may hope, for example, that children will be lifelong learners. But what if
evidence and experience tell us that interest in learning declines when students
are graded and made to work on academic assignments at home? Are we willing to
question any traditional practicesincluding grades and homeworkthat interfere
with important goals?...
Even when practices seem to be producing good results, a courageous educator
questions the criteria: Wait a minutewe say this policy works, but doesnt that
just mean it raises scores on bad tests? My classroom may be quiet and orderly,
but am I promoting intellectual and moral development, or merely compliance?
Arent our graduates getting into prestigious colleges mostly because theyre
from affluent families? Are we helping them become deep and passionate
thinkers?163
We understand clearly that teaching as a subversive activity is difficult for
novice, unprotected, and untenured teachers; but experienced teachers who have a
reasonable degree of security have an ethical obligation to teach subversively and
help novice teachers learn to teach subversively. These admonitions are both
explicit and implicit in the ideals articulated emphatically by Dewey, Freire, and
Noddings, not to mention the best thinking in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, de
Gournay, and others. Know, also, that we arent finished discussing similar themes
expressed by thinkers who support basic premises of education as a social praxis,
including Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meir, and others.
Life goals are not the only relevant goals of education and schooling, but they
deserve heavy emphasis. They have been seriously neglected. This neglect accounts
for the inhumane nature of many public schools and universities, not to mention the
damaged people that un-educative teachers and schools graduate into society. A
learners pursuit of life goals is inextricably linked with his or her pursuit of
other goals (including academic-vocational goals), and with the ethical goals of
other people. As a result, when school boards or administrators make it impossible
for students to achieve the abilities and understandings they wish to achieve,
including their dreams and life goals, parents and administrators can expect to
reap the resultsdiscouraged, unhappy, unmotivated, and angry children and young
adults;.
One of the most surprising things about neoliberal schools, where students are
unable to pursue life goals and life values in music and other arts, is not that
students drop out, but that more students dont drop out. Who in their right mind
would want to spend the majority of their time in schools acquiring little more
than numeracy and literacy skills, or learning how to take tests?

y0 summarize, the pursuit of human flourishing is natural, common, and nec- f0r
human beings. Thus, there are many good reasons for schools to make it
d phcy ma^ers t0 ensure tllat students are given the knowledge and resources ^a
neecl to achieve ethical life goals and life values.
if this is so, then there are many good reasons for schools and communities jiiake
certain that school music is a basic part of the core curriculum, kindergarten ougk
gra<^e twe^ve> anc*n0 good reason not to. And its equally important to make 1
tjjat CM programs are available for people who want to continue making music 5 uen
their school years are over. Why? Because all the primary values of music and uSic
education as a social praxisincluding happiness, enjoyment, fellowship, jjgalth
and well-being, intellectual engagement, self-identity, self-esteem, and more are
the same life values endorsed by the greatest thinkers in human history. In short,
music and education understood and implemented as social praxes are unique and
major sources of eudaimonia, the meaning of which we explained in Chapter 2.
Having established several basic principles of our praxial orientation, weve taken
an important step toward achieving a major aim of this chapter: weve found a
number of logical, ethical, and pragmatic arguments we can use to help us
understand the nature(s) and values of what education should be, and what it
should not be, and build a foundation for a praxial concept of music education.
Nevertheless, we need a way of continuing our quest to construct and elaborate a
praxial foundation that combines the best of what weve uncovered so far with ad-
ditional insights and support. Doing so will move us toward a deeper understanding
of the natures, values, and relationships among education, music education, and CM.
How do we embark on the next part of our journey? Lets use some of the same
strategies we employed at the end of the previous chapter. Ask yourself this: Is
there any sense in which educationconceived as any combination of points on a
continuum stretching across variations on formal, informal, and nonformal
learning, teaching, schooling, or community interactionsis simultaneously an
individual and a social-cultural activity? Yes. Without the integration of
individual agency and social- cultural actions and interactions, nobody can learn
anything. Education understood (partly) as the integration of individual and
social-cultural activity is a self-evident principle. Recall that a principle is
self-evident if its opposite is unthinkable.164 Indeed, neither education, nor
teaching, nor learning could exist without human activity without people acting as
individual-social agents and interacting individually and collectively with
caregivers, other learners, mentors, coaches, teachers, and so forth.
Consider a few everyday examples: an infant learning to talk through her nonformal
and informal mind-body actions and interactions with her caregivers, siblings, and
so forth; a teenager learning to play the guitar by himself through his informal
actions or with the help of peers or parents, and by listening to recordings or
watching YouTube tutorials, all of which are social-cultural artifacts produced by
other human-social beings; a university student learning to compose on his iPad
with the informal or formal guidance of his peers and professors.
These examples return us to the praxial themes of several scholars we cited at the
^ginning of this chapter. Recall Lawrence Cremins ecological concept of education,

which emphasized that people learn all sorts of things, not only formally and i^
mally in schools but also nonformally in everyday activities such as playing with
pe, talking with friends, attending parties, traveling to unfamiliar countries, or
recoye(. ing from a disease. People learn from living and from their lifeworlds. In
fact, $0^ of the most important things we learn are not the results of schooling;
theyre result of being in the world.
So, the praxial concept of education is also a transactional concept of education
learning, and teaching that situates socially each persons efforts to construct
his her knowledgeknowledge in the inclusive sense of numerous skills, understand
ings, dispositions of compassion and empathy, habits of mind, heart, and
ethiCa[ behavior, etc.in and through ecological relationships with his or her
environment^ circumstancespersonal familial, historical, social, cultural,
technological, racia[ gendered, economic, political, spiritual and many other
dimensions of life, whether inside or outside schools.
Any form of education conceived as a social praxis is a matter of culturally situ
ated encounters and acts of interpretation.165 When education and music are then,
rized and applied as praxes, they are fundamental sources of personal and social
agency. In the context of education, music education, and CM, agency emphasizes
facilitating students processes of learning as much as their efforts to create
musical products and the personal, musical, social and other meanings of their
creations. The aim, says music education theorist Sidsel Karlen, is to
create [learning] environments in which the positive experiential and learning
outcome of each student is in focusenvironments that may lead to students
pursuing a life-long interest in music instead of rejecting their music education
or, even worse, labelling themselves as unmusical.166
Heidi Westerlund, a music education philosopher, adds that when learners are
educated as musical agents, they can change their own experience and social
environment167 through their actions and interactions, which, says Karlsen, has
the potential to give rise to transformational agency.168
This returns and links us to important themes in our discussion of music in the
previous chapter. For example, by substituting the word education for music,
cultural musicologist Christopher Smalls thoughts take on wider and deeper
meanings: edu-cation is not a thing at all but an activity.169 Education is
something that people do.170 Continuing to rephrase Small, consider his wisdom as
it applies to education, learning, teaching, and educating:
The act of.. . [educating] ... establishes in the place where it is happening a set
of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act
lies. They are to be found not only between those . . . [skills, concepts, grades,
and data], which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of... [education]
... but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in ...
[edu-cation, learning, and teaching]; and they model. . . relationships between
person and person! between individual and society, between humanity and the natural
world and even perhaps the supernatural world. These are important matters,
perhaps the most important in human life.171
, r Abbs agrees and argues that, properly understood, education should take
\e^ets
beyond the status quo into what is not fully known, fully comprehended, fully
formalized. Education is the expression and development of a primary impulse for
truth, a deep epistemic instinct that we inherit as part of our biological
nature.172
re 4.1 affords a succinct way of summarizing several basic themes. This circles
jjggram isnt meant to account for all possible themes and interactions of the
axial concept of education, only major themes. It attempts to capture the idea that
? case of most instances of education, including various kinds of teaching and
jearning. four basic dimensions interact, as we detail below the figure.
Educational Context
Figure 4.1 Two Ways of Conceiving a Specific Educational Praxis, or Education

(1) Person(s) or doers: learners and teachers of all ages, kinds, abilities,
airr^ and desires, as well as parents, administrators, community members who enga,,
in...
(2) educational processes or doings: all educative and ethical forms of acti0)1
and interactionsnonformal, informal, formal teaching, mentoring, coaching, etc.-^
and encounters leading to the growth, development, and continued pursuit of
(3) educational-musical outcomesin the widest sense of this wordthat iUv
elude, but are not limited to, skillful, conceptual, corporeal, and intuitive
musiCa[ understandings; musical enjoyment, happiness, fellowship, passion,
intellect^ engagement, and personal meaningfulness; musical expressivity and
creativity, democratic and socially just dispositions, abilities, and
transformations ... as these develop in ...
(4) a wide range of integrated educational contexts, determined by learners aruj
teachers in school and community settings, which, in turn, are in wider musical,
social, political, communal, economic, gendered, architectural, and other places
and spacesevery one of which interacts with the other three dimensions above.
Of course, in real-time educative teaching-learning processes and experiences, aU
details of all four basic dimensions listed here are simultaneously interactive,
porous, and fluid. When people are learning and teaching and acting musically in
myriad ways, many details of all dimensions in this diagram affect all the others,
back and forth, in all directions, and in countless ways that this flat diagram
cant capture.
Before concluding this chapter, its important to repeat a major distinction we made
previously. Because teaching and learning share interactional patterns of human
effort that educative societies provide and organize to empower multiple
dimensions of peoples growth, then any specific type of education qualifies as a
practice. But of every educational practice qualifies as educational praxis,
because not every form of teaching and learning is carried out as it should be: to
enable students to achieve the finest and deepest values that learning in a
particular subject context can permit and continue to support throughout life. As
Dunne and Padraig Hogan put it, teachers in different domains of educational praxis
music education, science education, physical education, etc.should conceive
subjects as sites of praxis, as sites where individuals, by learning to think and
act critically and ethically, work cooperatively toward acquiring virtues,m
When we conceive and engage in musics or any form of music education or CM as
praxes, we begin to see more clearly that what were engaged in as music makers and
educators (facilitators) is a socially rooted, complex, coherent, and cooperative
activity that grows over time into its own ethical world.174 Following from the
work of the educational philosopher Chris Higgins, we can say that what
distinguishes music education from ice hockey, organic chemistry, and science
education is how (say) a secondary school songwriting class, or a community concert
band, or a middle school jazz ensemble becomes a safe and joyful home for learners;
it "becomes home to a distinctive set of answers to the basic ethical questions:
What is it excellent to achieve or become?175 By engaging in acts of teaching and
learning in any context of music education praxis, or CM praxis, learners and
teachers come to understand, feel, embody, and value the internal goods of that
praxis.

When we talk about the internal goods of a praxis, we mean that the doings,
ifia\dngs> feeling5- ancl values of that praxis (e.g., an African drumming
ensemble, a ,chool rock band, an electroacoustic music composition class) can only
be understood j,y people who actively engage in the reflective, felt, and embodied
actions and contexts of a specific praxis; or, as Higgins puts it, they can only
be appreciated by those who have apprenticed themselves to it, and cannot be cashed
out in instrumental terms-176 This is one reason many parents and administrators
fail to grasp the natures a0d values of musics and music education: theyve never
engaged in the concrete and reflective actions and felt experiences of a site of
praxial music making and listening a home, a site, a space and place of musical
endeavors where people, acting individually and cooperatively, make music and
listen to music in one or multiple ways to achieve their musical desires, dreams,
and the virtues that can accompany them.
However, theres no escaping a fact that experienced music teachers of all kinds ]
<moW all too well: despite all the positives of applying the concept of praxis,
there are many ways in which students may be distant from, resistant to, or at sea
with, what it has to offerand the perhaps no less numerous ways, direct and
indirect, by which they may be brought towards it.177 Indeed, although a music
educator may bring a tremendous range of abilities and a deep enthusiasm and
passion for sharing musics with her students, there will always be situations in
which students may not be engaged by the materials at all or may have their
relationship to it refracted,, through varying intensities of interest, dreaminess,
apathy or antagonism.178 So in addition to enabling various learners musical
abilities and educating other dimensions of their personhood through music
teaching and learning, music educators must also be adept at navigating the fluid
and fluctuating emotional complexities of all teaching and learning situations.
This also applies in CM contexts. As Dunne puts it, there is always something at
stake for the teacher and the students, so that [so- called] successdefined
largely by the goods of the subject but conditioned by the complexities of the
situationis never guaranteed.179
Not surprisingly then, Noddings argues that teachers must always be cognizant of
their multilayered response-ability to students as whole persons,180 and that
the first great good of teachingresponse-ability and its positive effectsis
clearly relational.
Teaching is thoroughly relational, and many of its goods are relational: the
feeling of safety in a thoughtful teachers classroom, a growing intellectual
enthusiasm in both teacher and student, the challenge and satisfaction shared by
both in engaging new material, the awakening sense (for both) that teaching and
life are never- ending moral quests.181
We can and must extend the concept of internal goods and virtuous praxial
conduct beyond schools and into the world. Here we reiterate Deweys words, cited
earlier, that urge us to recover the continuity between the arts and the
processes, products, and needs of peoples everyday lives.182 Recall that for Dewey
the values of musics (poetry, painting, dance, and so on) are not sealed inside
isolated, disembodied art works. Rather, the values of musics reside in the active,
felt, and interactive social dynamics through which and in which musics are made
and put to work for a wide variety of expressive and social reasons. The values of
musics, music
education, and CM for learners for all ages can be understood and experienced 0 .
in relation to socially rooted, complex, coherent, and cooperative activity that
gr v over time into its own ethical world.183 From Deweys pragmatic perspective, 5
from our praxial perspective, musics find and express their meaningfulness and
ternal goods in relation to, and in recognition of the human goods and virtues a'*'
enable people to achieve. i
Of course, as Higgins reminds us, teachers encounter numerous tensions tempting to
do good workwork that is educative, effective, excellent, ethical,. ' j
enjoyable. Some of these tensions result from fundamental differences betwe ^!
musics and schools, especially rigid school situations: 6,1 i
Music speaks not only to the mind but to the emotions and to the body; teaching, at
least in the context of schooling, tends to address us as disembodied minds. Music
is about showing; school teaching is largely about telling. Music prizes nuance,
variation, innovation; pedagogy tends to promote the cut-and-dried and
conventional.18'!
7. CONCLUSION
Building on the themes of the last stage of this chapter, we now have a multipart
way of proceeding to say what education is. We have four related dimensions of
educa. tion as a social praxis. Each dimension must be considered in relation to
all thc others and to other dimensions of educations numerous natures and values,
which well continue to examine in forthcoming chapters.
So besides having natures and values, of their own, each dimension pictured in
Figure 4.1 has multidirectional links with all the other dimensions. These four di-
mensions form a dynamic system of dialectic relationships. Learners and teachers
act and react in relation to many kinds of spoken and unspoken feedbackemotional,
cognitive, social, cultural, etc.that arises continuously during music
teachinglearning encounters. And because the relationships formed between and
among all these complex dimensions, and others we havent included in the circles
diagram, we can expect these relationships to generate a wide range of beliefs,
emotions, reactions, and controversies.
A useful way to tie several thoughtsbut certainly not all points in this chapter-
is to alter the visual form of the word education in three ways: EDUCATIONS, Edu-
cation, and education.
1. EDUCATIONS (uppercase) refers to all possible instances and forms of teaching
and learning in the world (preschool, primary, secondary, and tertiary edu-cation;
vocational or technical education; pre-tertiary or community college education;
adult and continuing education; etc.). EDUCATIONS carried out as praxes refers to
all possible instances and forms of educative and ethical teaching and learning,
hence our jjluralization of EDUCATIONS.
2. Education (uppercase E) refers to one specific instance of educational praxis
thats recognizable in virtue of the details of each of the four interacting,
intersubjective dimensions of human engagement, as illustrated in Figure 4.1.
jn the contexts of music education and CM, an example of Education in the ^jal
sense would be the effective, relational, responsive, and educative teaching- Piil
ping prcesses occur in a band, choral, or string ensemble that empower h^jpants
to create music expressively for the wide range of values that musicing ? ^
jiStening affords them in their communities. Another example is a primary classroom
in Northern Ireland where teachers and students use iPad music ^ c such as Synth,
Magic Piano, and Guitar Lab to compose, arrange, and rehearse ffgs fr a community
concert' one of which articulates the need for peace and rec- S dilation between
Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. A third example would flj1ow the people,
processes, products, and contexts in and of a womens prison near nnorto, Portugal,
interweave to help incarcerated mothers learn lullabies they can ing t their
*nfants t0 promote mother-infant bonding.185
In a nutshell, these three examples attempt to sketch how single instances of
gducation would necessarily include, but not be limited to:
a. The people who learn, and teach and learn, one or more musics for the values
and human goods they obtain from doing so and for the values their musics
provides to others
b. The processes of musicing and listening (and dancing, worshipping, etc.) that
the learners and teachers of a specific musical praxis decide to use, develop,
integrate, perpetuate, elaborate, change radically, and so forth
c. The wide range of educational and musical values and goods explained in the
preceding pages, as these come about in and through the processes, encounters, and
relationships involved in learning to make and listen to musics of many kinds
d. The contextual detailssocial, historical, cultural, spatial, visualthat
have myriad effects on any specific instance of music teaching and learning
3. education (lowercase) refers to what we described in (c), but with the added
points that a praxial education in, about, and through music should focus on both
musical and personal growth, flourishing, and life values, as weve explained these
terms to this point in the book, and that well continue to explain in future
chapters.
So, to be clear, we deny that education (lowercase), as in an education, should
be conceived and carried out to achieve nothing more than a static body of skills
and concepts. And we reject any suggestion that education (lowercase), as in an
education, should be conceived and carried out as nothing more than job training.
Instead, an education in the praxial sense is for a broad and deep range of values
and human goods, including personal growth and community life both now and in the
future.
In conclusion, the springboard principle of education as a social praxis meshes
with our concept of music as a social praxis: both praxes aim for and emphasize the
attainment of the same wide range of values through complementary processes; and
both place equal emphasis on respecting learners (of any age) as individual and
social agents engaged in ongoing growth toward personal-social musical, personal,
and communal thriving.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW
1. Define the natures and values of education.
2. List five of the most logical and persuasive concepts of education.
3. Why should music educators and CM facilitators be concerned with the natures
ar^ values of education?
4. Summarize the main themes of ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese and pre-
historjc Educations.
5. Choose two educational philosophers and compare and contrast their views on
education
6. Summarize four major themes of this chapters praxial concept of education.
SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS
1. Noddings, Nel. Philosophy of Education. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007).
2. Jackson, Philip. What Is Education? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012).
3. Bowman, Wayne. Musics Place in Education. In The Oxford Handbook of Music
Education, ed. Gary McPherson and Graham Welch, 21-39. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
4. Postman, Neil, and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive Activity.
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1969).
5. Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How
Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
6. Philips, D. C. What Is Philosophy of Education? In The Sage Handbook of
Philosophy of Education, ed. Richard Bailey, Robin Barrow, David Carr, and
Christine McCarthy, 3-20. (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010).
7. Noddings, Nel. Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
8. Silverman, Marissa. A Critical Ethnography of Democratic Music Listening.
British Journal of Music Education vol. 30, no. 1 (March 2013): 7-25.
9. Higgins, Chris. The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional
Practice. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).