A Place for Music Education in the Humanities

Coursework in the Humanities

I begin with an example. A university classroom of music teacher certification students is upset with Robin Thicke’s depiction of women in the summer hit video for “Blurred Lines.” They are concerned about the ways in which gender is constructed and policed, in this case through popular culture and the media. What message is being communicated by this video, where the men stand fully clothed while the women dance nearly naked around them? We read the video like a text, opening its message to multiple interpretations. There may be a relationship, some speculate, between the normalization of sexual assault—as reported by recent newspaper accounts—and the kinds of music that are designed for youth consumption, particularly those that play cunningly within the “blurred lines” of general taste and accepted cultural norms. Our class decides to compose a musical response to Robin Thicke by throwing “old codes into new combination”—their words. These music students are thinking like educators and artists. They are not merely “adjusting” themselves into the world in which they have been inserted by time and place; they are exploring it, debating it, and changing it.

An education in the humanities aims for something much larger than coping strategies and survival skills. The humanities are those disciplines, like music, philosophy, and literature, through which the study of human culture enlarges and enriches the inquirer and in turn the society in which he or she lives. Study in the humanities is synonymous with a liberal education, with independence of thought and action, and with a life lived fully, freely, and deliberately. Craft serves inquiry, not the other way around. This is an open concept of study, in other words, one that is different from job training or preparation to adapt and survive in schools. For the education philosopher Martha Nussbaum, the humanities exercise those “faculties of thought and imagination that make us human and make our relationships rich human relations, rather than relationships of mere use and manipulation.” ³ Nussbaum is suggesting that the purpose of schooling extends beyond the creation of human capital alone. The modern university must do more than simply prepare us for the requirements of work and pay.

Needless to say, the external mandates placed on public school teaching do little to enhance a desire for music teacher independence. Given the uncertainties of the job market, many graduates may forgo the appeals of a liberal education and seek directed forms of apprenticeship. Some states are answering this call by experimenting with practice-based teacher certification models that move teacher licensure out of the university. If, in this centennial issue of Music Educators Journal, we take stock of our field, we see that the university music education degree is heading into a major transition phase. Will we enlarge our current vocational model, or shall we argue for something else? What have we to say about creativity in the schools, the teacher as artist, and the pleasures of idiosyncratic learning?

Preparing for the Working World

Over the past one hundred years, Music Educators Journal has served as our profession’s primary site for music teacher development. Just as important, MEJ has provided an unrivaled platform for important historical debates. Over time, problems emerge and recede, revealing new conditions of social uncertainty and changes in aesthetic taste and production. Take a minute to think about the following question: What preoccupies us? What engages our attention, what occupies our time? If a society is defined by the problems that occupy its attention, what do our preoccupations reveal?

University music departments have found themselves in a very peculiar place where the discourses of excellence and merit have met up with the economics of austerity and inequality. We have better students than ever before, but there are fewer opportunities for them after graduation. In this context, what university program of study would wish to deny its graduates the most practical education it can possibly offer? I remain uneasy, however. I worry that today’s university music major is more preoccupied with adaptation than adventure. Rather than understanding the pursuit of excellence as self-forming, I worry that the motivation to do something well arises out of a competition for scarce resources. These are economic concerns that, rightly or wrongly, block out larger conversations about the purpose of a university education.

Tell me what to do to secure a place in the working world and I will do it, our students say. In this climate, educational excellence becomes synonymous with instruction, with training and procedural know-how. Occupied with credentializing students, the university’s responsibility to create something new or imagine alternatives goes unexplored. As specialists teaching future specialists, we teach for “what is” more than “what might be.” This has been a long-standing tension in university teacher preparation, a problem that education philosopher John Dewey recognized in his day: “When achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human-being can, the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside.” ⁴ Lacking the language to articulate a vision of human flourishing in the public school, education becomes an “instrumental” transaction, a tool for attaining specific ends, with specific methods for attaining those ends.

A preoccupation with evidence naturally follows: evidence of student outcomes, evidence of teacher effectiveness, numeric scores for teacher impact, and rankings of universities and colleges. Data have begun to record increasingly larger aspects of human experience, reducing teaching relationships that were once singular in their approach into relationships of cause and effect, reducing education to teacher input and learner outcome. I call attention to the great irony of the Internet age: Our dreams of global interconnectivity have given way to the lives of surveillance. Learning must be publically evaluated at all stages of growth. ⁵ The value of exploring a topic at an idiosyncratic pace and direction is increasingly uncommon. And accountability means that learning must always be visible, especially to those who have little interest or experience in the arts.

How did we get here? How did the concept of education become so inextricably linked to preparation for work? How did the complexities of teaching become so reduced? Michael Bloomberg, recent mayor of New York City, is fond of saying that if you can’t measure it, you can’t change it. But can this really be true? I am reminded of the German word Bildung (sometimes translated as “education” or “formation”), a concept of education where learning and self-cultivation are open to the individual and his or her desires, where the purpose of education is a “building” of character and virtue, a nod to the ancient Stoics who saw education as the way of wisdom, not the mere study of books. We have no equivalent notion in the English language that captures the aims of Bildung. This is why, I think, defenders of the humanities fail so spectacularly when their ideas are held up against the “real world”—when education, in other words, is synonymous with our fears and preoccupations, with survival, merit, and job readiness.

The “real world” haunts my students. It is a dreary place that is often called upon to invalidate the imagination. It happens at least once a semester—that a complex and moving musical experience in one of my teacher preparation classes is “checked” by its professed nonreality. Or, a reading that does not directly apply to the mechanics of teaching is met with puzzling looks. We need to ask ourselves some very tough questions. Why is musical creativity in the classroom so hard to imagine? What effects have two decades of research on creativity had on the preparation of today’s music teachers? It is as if the work of the artist is somehow in contradiction with the expectations of music teaching. Here I wish to point out the obvious. Artists do not adapt to the world as it is: They change it. They add something new. But many music teacher candidates desire to enter a world that is predictable and secure. How did innovation and imagination become decoupled from music teaching? Does this have something to do with how we prepare musicians and music teachers and how we conceive of the world we live in?

Specialize Early or Study Broadly?

Debates about the purpose of education are taking place across the world. Most have to do with standardization, testing, and teacher quality. ⁶ But any debate must acknowledge that the manner of education has always been distributed unequally, with ends that privilege some and not others. As I make the case for a less vocational music teacher education, it is important to state that the legacy of an education in the humanities does not come to us unsullied by class, gender, and race distinctions. The humanities’ nonutility was once seen as the emblem of an elite education, a marker that endowed the privileged with symbolic capital—a kind of disposable luxury. “I would make them all learn English,” wrote Winston Churchill, “and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.” ⁷ At the turn of the 20th century, this was the model that some educational leaders defended as appropriate for all students.

Dewey joined this debate, arguing that educational reform did not hinge on content per se, but in the usefulness of particular content in helping children make meaning out of life’s contingencies. Passivity was an evil that drained a democracy of vital resources, and if learning Latin could be taught in such a way that it made communal life more open, all the better. In contemporary terms, the question is not should we teach classical music or something else, the question is how do we teach classical music (or something else) in such a way that it is meaningful and life-enhancing? It is the subtle but profound distinction between teaching the clarinet and teaching the child to do something with the clarinet. The former is a question of mere craft; the latter is a question of artistry. “If the child approaches the book without intellectual hunger,” Dewey wrote, “without alertness, without a questioning attitude, then the result is the one so deplorably common: such abject dependence upon books as weakens and cripples vigor of thought and inquiry.” ⁸

The change Dewey wanted was “the change from a more or less passive and inert recipiency and restraint to one of buoyant outgoing energy.” ⁹ As a pragmatist, Dewey indeed saw education as instrumental—but instrumental to a life of fulfilling work, self-understanding, and social responsibility. These progressive aims were not in contradiction to the humanities; rather, they were reattached to the Stoic values that saw education as self-forming and self-directed. I want to reattach these principles to aesthetic aims, so that the teaching and learning of music is an artistic pursuit, one with both norm-governed and/or nonstandardized ends, a place where specialization and exploration coexist. In this vision, the music educator is both craftsman and artist.

The early twentieth century saw university music educators in the United States engaged in a spirited debate about the purpose of their newly inaugurated degree programs. Was music performance an appropriate major? Should music majors study broadly or specialize early? The fledgling National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) commissioned the composer Randall Thompson to investigate the role of music in thirty colleges and universities. In a 1935 report called “College Music,” Thompson observed that

It would be serious enough if credit for Applied Music in college were limited to Applied Music as a subject auxiliary to others studied in Music. In some institutions, however, the student is permitted to concentrate in Applied Music, and often undertakes the required complement of theoretical and historical courses reluctantly, without enthusiasm or understanding. Still more serious is the unconcealed dislike which many Applied Music students have for the non-musical, Liberal Arts courses which they are required to take. They look upon these courses as an intrusion into their program. ¹⁰

Thompson’s report recommended more offerings in the liberal arts and less emphasis on the vocational study of music through performance alone. I read his recommendations with some ambivalence, however. On the one hand, his philosophy is a throwback to the notion that applied subjects were made impure by contact with hands-on work. This is not a position that makes sense today. But on the other hand, Thompson spoke to a vision of the musician that was larger than craft or procedural knowledge alone. Much like today, the students in Thompson’s survey approached their university study in ways that were transactional and above all practical, with little interest in courses like philosophy, history, and literature. “Teach me the requirements of playing in an orchestra. I haven’t time for other interests.” Today we might hear this: “Teach me to write a lesson plan. Teach me to assess student work. I haven’t time—and nor can I evaluate—the creative classroom.” As mentioned earlier, these are the demands of the tradesman more than of the artist, a distinction worth appreciating at a time when musical forms are increasingly open and unstable and larger arenas for learning music are moving outside of the school.

At this unique moment in our profession’s long and hard-fought history, I believe it is time to reignite the debate about the purpose of a university music education and to argue for a new kind of musical graduate. But the solutions we seek out shouldn’t stop with various modalities of professionalism. It is not enough to say that the university musician should have more and diverse skills—that he or she should be prepared to play by ear, sing, improvise, and move fluidly between styles and genres. It is not enough to diversify his or her objects of study. These are very good things, and they would reflect tremendous progress, and they may even prepare the 21st-century music teacher for the new contingencies of the so-called “real world.” But, should we stop at issues of skill and craft alone and leave unexplored the value of imagination and wonder, we will recommit ourselves to the vocational model of music teacher education all over, only slightly altered. We must seek out the richest definition of what it means to be musically educated. Rather than modes of professionalism, can we speak about modalities of life and living, where the occupation of life and work is at one with the objects of one’s study, where the study of music is an intrinsic need that is pursued differently from one individual to the next?

A Recommitment to Creativity

I borrow this vision of a liberal education from French classical philosopher Pierre Hadot, who reacquainted the philosophy of education community with the distinction between “philosophy” as a way of living and “philosophies” that are the discourses and bodies of knowledge that are studied about rather than practiced and explored. The concern for Hadot was that students and teachers were studying the great books of philosophy, but they weren’t inhabiting the ancient notion of philosophy as a way to wisdom:

One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view of becoming fully developed humans beings, but to specialists, in order that they may learn to train other specialists. This is the danger of “Scholasticism”—that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today. ¹¹

At all levels, musical instruction consists of explaining authorized works, learning particular methods of interpretation, and training students in the rules a tradition. Procedural know-how is passed on by one generation of specialists to the next, repeating a process that has resulted in no small degree of alienation. Researcher David Williams, in a recent edition of Music Educators Journal, argued that “students can do more musically at home without us than they can at school with us.” ¹² The cycle of “scholasticism”—making musical study a trade that is passed from specialist to budding specialist—means that teachers teach the way they were taught. Students learn what the teacher has been trained to teach. And all others must find meaning outside this structure. I am concerned that the imagination—the practice of seeing the world as if it could be otherwise—fits uneasily within the vocational model of university teacher preparation.

The specialist model of teacher preparation presupposes a world of certainty and predictability. As an educational ideal, I admit that it may help teachers survive the vicissitudes of today’s evidence- and outcomes-driven school environment. “Tell me how to raise test scores. Tell me how to raise my value-added measures. Tell me how to teach the standards.” But ironically, the greatest danger of specialization is the adverse effect it can have on one’s ability to adapt to change. Did the vocational model help orchestrally trained musicians survive the changing face of music in the twentieth century? Will the apprentice model help tomorrow’s band director survive the changing face of public school music education? Forget about what music education will look like in the next one hundred years. What about the next ten? The next five?

If survival is a preoccupation, then I posit that there is only one way to survive in these uncertain times. It is to think of teaching as both craft and art. Those who fulfill the role of teacher-as-artist must be trained to use skill imaginatively and the imagination skillfully. They must be artists, tradespeople, entrepreneurs, critics, and restless public intellectuals. They must be unsatisfied with the present order of things and willing to alert us to the normalized and taken for granted. The humanities are oriented toward this kind of interdisciplinarity of thought and action, with multiplicities of role and vision embedded in its study. For philosopher Maxine Greene, an education in the humanities equips the teacher to move deliberately and strategically within the competing landscapes that make up the “real world” of teaching. The teacher,

conscious of his or her freedom, can move outward towards empirical study, analytic study, or quantitative study of all kinds. Being grounded, he or she will be far less likely to confuse abstraction with concreteness, formalized and schematized reality with what is “real.” Made aware of the multiplicity of perspectives, made aware of incompleteness and of a human reality to be pursued, the individual may reach “a plane of consciousness of highest tension.” Difficulties will be created everywhere, and the arts and humanities will come into their own.” ¹³

Our schools and universities need teachers and researchers who are comfortable with incompleteness, artists who possess the courage to work among and across competing boundaries, and skilled practitioners who refuse the theory and practice divide.

Music education researchers who study creativity have looked primarily at children, but what about university music teacher preparation programs? Are universities credentialing bodies or places of apprenticeship and experimentation? We must recommit ourselves to the aesthetic and artistic aspect of music teacher education. The arts and humanities ask us to be creative—to pose questions, to seek out multiple ways of knowing, to ask, “What if?” This is certainly one rationale for a university music education, and one we need now more than ever.