A former MENC president discusses critical topics affecting music education and offers his views concerning the future.
The Grandmasters Series continues to offer music educators the opportunity to hear from the senior members of our profession. This issue welcomes the contribution of Paul R. Lehman.
Lehman is professor emeritus of music at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he served for many years as senior associate dean of the School of Music. He earned his bachelor's degree from Ohio University and his master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan. He taught in the public schools of Ohio and at the University of Colorado, the University of Kentucky, and the Eastman School of Music. He also served as music specialist with the United States Department of Education in Washington and performed as a bassoonist with various orchestras.
From 1984 to 1986, Lehman served as president of MENC. Previously he had served as chair of the Music Education Research Council, member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Research in Music Education, chair of the MENC National Commission on Instruction, and project director for the three sessions of the National Symposium on the Applications of Psychology to the Teaching and Learning of Music. He also chaired the committees that developed the voluntary national standards for K-12 music, opportunity-to-learn standards for music instruction, and performance standards for music.
Active as a speaker and consultant, Lehman has addressed music educators in almost every state and abroad. He is the author of more than two hundred articles, reviews, books, and chapters in books, chiefly on measurement and evaluation, curriculum, and teacher education.
One of the things we learn from experience is that it's difficult to learn from someone else's experience. Even so, I'm pleased to be given the opportunity to share here a few of the views and conclusions I've reached during a long career in music education.
Almost everyone who has thought seriously about the issue, from Plato to the present, agrees that music belongs among the basic disciplines taught in the school curriculum. But why is music so important to people? And why is the sequential study of music necessary? These questions can probably never be answered once and for all because there are so many divergent views concerning the purposes of education. The best answers currently available are those provided in Vision 2020, MENC's proposed model for the future of music education.[
Music is one of the most powerful, most compelling, and most glorious manifestations of every cultural heritage. All of us ought to be able to understand, enjoy, and participate fully in our musical environment. Music in school is not merely an activity to be engaged in as a respite from the serious business of education; it's an important means of discovering underlying truths about human nature. The fundamental and pervasive role that music plays in the entertainment business and in popular culture sometimes blinds people to the very different but essential role it plays in education.
The idea that music is one of the basic disciplines requires continuous reinforcement by music educators. This reinforcement can be fostered by ensuring that music programs are based on standards, that they do not unduly emphasize entertainment, that they include meaningful assessment, and that they are designed for all students rather than for just the talented few.
The purpose of education is the pursuit of truth and beauty, the development of human capacities, and the improvement of the quality of life. Preparing students to live rich, satisfying, and rewarding lives should take precedence over preparing them narrowly for roles in the manufacturing and marketing of consumer goods. Students are not mere pawns on the gigantic chessboard of international economic competition.
The nature of work is becoming so specialized and so diverse, and it is changing so rapidly, that employers rely increasingly on the job-specific training they themselves provide. The preparation that will best equip young people to participate effectively in the workforce is a solid grounding in the five basic clusters of disciplines: language arts, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, and fine and performing arts. The personal skills most valued in the marketplace include creativity, flexibility, discipline, and skill in working cooperatively with others—all skills emphasized in the arts. It is shortsighted and misguided to try to prepare students to earn a better living at the expense of preparing them to live a better life. Education is what we have left over when we have forgotten the things we learned in school.
In explaining why music belongs in the school curriculum, its role in enhancing the quality of peoples' lives typically receives far too little emphasis. What determines the quality of life? Figures reporting the sale of automobiles, TV sets, and vacation cruises purport to reflect something called our standard of living, but they tell us little about the quality of our lives. The quality of life is determined by the extent to which life is satisfying, purposeful, and worthwhile to the individual. Apart from physical well-being, the most fundamental determinant of the quality of life is continued individual growth. Individual growth can be achieved by many means, large and small. These include interacting with aesthetic objects; working cooperatively with other people; developing new skills; having new experiences; participating in expressive, creative, or artistic activities; producing one's own entertainment; contemplating philosophical or religious matters; realizing one's potential; and fulfilling one's dreams.
Material possessions are enjoyable but don't necessarily contribute to individual growth. Music education, on the other hand, does. Nothing taught in the schools contributes more immediately or more directly to so many of the essential factors that affect the quality of life than music does. Young people can use their musical skills and knowledge to improve the quality of their lives as long as they live, regardless of their occupations and their economic or social status.
Music exalts the human spirit. It transforms the human experience. It's a basic instinct in every human being. That's why it holds such enormous potential to elevate and uplift the human race. It brings joy, beauty, and satisfaction to people's lives, all qualities increasingly important in a world that tends to reduce individuals to numbers in huge databases and to devalue their human qualities. Any child whose educational program does not include the systematic study of music has been cheated just as surely as if his or her program had not included the study of science or history.
In many schools, the music curriculum should be revised to reflect better the balance and comprehensiveness called for in the National Standards for Music Education.[
What should be the nature of these courses? The options are almost limitless, depending on the interests and abilities of the teacher. Why are such courses needed? In every school, there are students who are keenly interested in music and would welcome a chance to study it but can't because there are no course offerings for which they are eligible. Many of these students have broad knowledge of popular or ethnic music and musicians. Some have organized their own performing groups. Most important, the students not being reached by music include many of our brightest young people. In just a few years, they will be our school superintendents and principals, our school board members and state legislators, our mayors and governors. These are the people who will be making the decisions affecting school music programs.
One of the most serious obstacles to making music available to all students, especially in the elementary school, is that there are too many principals who themselves did not have challenging, exciting, and rewarding experiences with music when they were students. Music education cannot afford yet another generation of adults who did not experience firsthand the joy and satisfaction that come from studying music in school.
Why is it that some schools have no trouble finding time for music while in other schools it seems almost impossible? There's no good reason whatsoever. Any principal who says, “We don't have time for music,” simply means, “We place a higher priority on other things.” To claim that “the schedule” is the culprit is to assume that we should begin with a schedule and then try to fit learning experiences into it as best we can. That's exactly the opposite of what ought to be done. We should begin with educational goals and then devise a schedule that will make it possible to achieve them. Often, it's argued, the problem is the bus schedule. Any school administrator who makes students' learning experiences subservient to a bus schedule, instead of the other way around, ought to be fired on the spot.
MENC's opportunity-to-learn standards call for a minimum of ninety minutes of music instruction per week at the elementary level.[
Time is a false issue. The real issue is a lack of will. Schools all across America are finding time for music, and, if some can, the rest can also. Time is the only resource that is allocated with absolute equality to every school in the nation. A lack of will is masquerading as a lack of time.[
Computers, electronic keyboards, synthesizers, CD-ROMs, and other MIDI devices make it possible for every student to create, perform, listen to, and analyze music to an extent previously unattainable. Technology is altering in profound and irreversible ways the means by which music is taught and learned, just as it is altering the roles that music plays in peoples' lives. The media and technology used to teach music in the school should include the media and technology used to experience music outside the school.
Some writers have claimed that instructional technology, coupled with creative software, can make teachers largely unnecessary. But that won't happen. In the fifteenth century, the invention of the printing press caused grave concern among teachers, who feared that this new technology would cost them their jobs. Why would anyone need a teacher if every student could have a book? The printing press didn't eliminate the need for teachers, but it utterly changed their roles. Teachers are necessary as mentors, guides, and resource persons. The only jobs that technology can eliminate are those that have already been depersonalized. Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer should be.
The role of the teacher will be more important in the future than ever before. Why? Because only a teacher can explain something in a hundred ways. Only a teacher can ask just the right question. Only a teacher can give just the right demonstration. Only a teacher can help students to manage their intellectual growth within the context of the emotional and social problems they face. Above all, only a teacher can show love and respect and concern for students.
Civilizations are judged by posterity not by the strength of their armies, their balance-of-payment surpluses, or their average test scores, but by their contributions to the arts and humanities. That's what will remain when everything else has been swept away by time. American education in recent years has taken an unmistakable turn toward the narrowly technical and away from the broader humanistic values that have traditionally served as its foundation. The most valuable skills in tomorrow's world will be the ability to think clearly, the ability to listen, and the ability to communicate effectively. Yet these are precisely the abilities most vulnerable to deterioration in the electronic age. Interacting almost exclusively by means of technology undermines the development of these skills, dulls our senses, and reduces our awareness of our own shortcomings in communicating with our fellow human beings. The virtual world is at best a drab and lifeless substitute for the real world. The full effects of a generation of youth sitting endlessly before computer monitors are not yet clear. But it's already evident that special efforts will be necessary in the future to humanize and personalize our technology-saturated environment if we're to restore the warmth and sensitivity that are found only in human relationships, that are necessary to our emotional health, and that are developed so effectively by the arts.[
Technology has made marvelous contributions to civilization. But technology has a downside. The results of technology have polluted our environment so that in some places we can scarcely breathe the air or drink the water. Technology has created a chasm between rich and poor nations that, paradoxically, the poor are seeking to breach by a still more frantic pursuit of technology. Further, it has given us the means to destroy this beautiful planet of ours and every form of life that exists on it.
Music, like technology, has made uniquely important contributions to civilization. But music has no downside. Music doesn't pollute. It cleanses. Music doesn't impoverish. It enriches. Music doesn't threaten people. It ennobles them. Throughout history, music has never brought harm or damage. It has brought only pleasure and enjoyment.[
In the unending arguments over higher standards and high-stakes testing, little attention has been paid to one of the most important issues of all: how to improve the quality of teaching. Higher standards and more rigorous assessment, while necessary, will yield only frustration and failure without better teaching. What the nation needs to improve education, perhaps more than anything else, is a massive, focused, all-out effort to improve the quality of teaching.
Some critics of teacher education claim that teaching skills cannot be taught. People either have these skills or they don't, we're told. Further, professional education is not really necessary; almost anyone can teach. All that is required is enthusiasm, love of children, and some knowledge of subject matter. But these claims are simply not true. Those qualities are important, but they are not enough.
Prospective teachers need to know how to plan a lesson, how to manage a rehearsal, how to organize a course, how to explain, how to motivate, how to teach rhythm and part-songs and tone quality and technique, how to ask the right questions, how to respond most helpfully to students, how to demonstrate effectively, how to select the best teaching materials, how to communicate with the baton instead of talking incessantly, and how to evaluate learning.
These skills are essential. They're the foundation of teaching and of learning. And they can be taught. These are the skills that should form the basis of our teacher education curricula. We sometimes hear complaints that education courses are irrelevant or too theoretical. How can these skills be irrelevant? They can be made irrelevant only by divorcing them from the subject matter and presenting them as abstract theory. That may happen sometimes, but there is no excuse for it.
Teaching is an art. It cannot be reduced to formulas or recipes. It requires a vast amount of spontaneity and an enormous ability to improvise. It's not a science, but it can have a basis in research. There are clear relationships between things teachers do and things students learn. The task of teacher education is to help teachers apply what is known about these relationships. Some of the relationships are not yet fully understood. Some are weak. Some are subject to disagreements in interpretation. But efforts to understand them are critical to the future of education.[
It's a waste of time to seek to reform education by means of “top-down” solutions. Experience suggests that only “bottom-up” solutions will work. Ultimately education cannot be reformed by Congress, state legislatures, or state education agencies. It must be reformed by teachers and administrators at the local level.
The corporate world has found that success requires respect for the individual worker. Successful companies treat their employees with dignity. They trust them. They give them the autonomy needed to do their jobs. Unfortunately, that's often not true in education. Virtually everything teachers do is circumscribed by law, regulation, or policy. No other professionals are so systematically restricted in their freedom to exercise their professional judgment. No other professionals daily face evidence that they are not trusted, that their competence is open to question, and that anyone with the authority to do so will develop rules to limit their discretionary behavior.
Teachers are not part of the problem, as some legislators seem to think. They are part of the solution. Otherwise, there can be no solution because there is no one else to implement it. Teachers should be treated as professionals, not as hourly employees. They should play a major role in the full range of education policy decisions. They should be freed from the trivial and irrelevant duties that now consume much of their time. The school environment must support rather than demean teachers.
Recruiting and retaining good teachers requires not only better working conditions but also better salaries. Teachers' salaries must be raised, but that cannot happen to any significant degree until we abandon our insistence on paying our weakest teachers as much as we pay our best teachers with equal experience. That practice is so at odds with common sense that it undermines the public's confidence (especially that of the business community) in the ability of schools to allocate their salary budgets wisely, and I believe it often works to the disadvantage of music teachers.
Vision 2020 provides a valuable blueprint for guiding music education through the next two decades. In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which road she should take. He answers that it depends on where she wants to go. When she replies that she doesn't really care where she goes, he points out that it doesn't really matter, then, which road she takes. Vision 2020 is based on the premise that we music educators must determine where we want to go before we can figure out how to get there.[
The plight of music and the other arts in American schools is related to their plight in American life. Why, for example, is art music important in the lives of so few Americans and popular music important in the lives of so many? Why is there such a disastrous dichotomy between art music and popular music anyway?
Music once played an integral role in the daily lives of men, women, and children. In primitive societies, it still does. But, in our complex society, art music has been isolated and placed on a pedestal. The difficulty is not that it isn't taken seriously enough; the difficulty is that it is taken too seriously. It has been made an object of veneration. As a result, art music is often seen solely as a possession of the rich and powerful while ordinary people turn to popular music for enjoyment.
At the same time, work, which once coexisted comfortably with art, has changed its character markedly. Prior to the nineteenth century, the work that people engaged in provided an outlet for their imagination and creativity. They took pride in the artistic merit of the things they created, even the humble things created for everyday use. Today, craftsmanship is largely irrelevant in the workplace. Artistic merit has been continuously devalued since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Today, in the view of many, the purpose of work is simply to earn a living, while the purpose of art is to symbolize wealth and leisure.
Every person needs opportunities to express his or her creative and aesthetic potential. If those opportunities cannot be found in work, they must be found in leisure. Christopher Lasch has argued that it is a mistake to view the task of arts educators as broadening the market for art. Our task, he claims, is instead to end the segregation between art and life and to blur the distinction between work and leisure.[
Since its banishment from the workplace, the artistic impulse has taken refuge in the rarefied realm of art for art's sake. But it is futile to debate the relative merits of utilitarian and aesthetic rationales for arts education. The issue is not how to make artistic activities useful but how to make useful activities artistic. When we have learned to do that, art music can come off its pedestal and take its place alongside popular music in the life of the average American.
Music is vitamin M. It's a chocolate chip in the cookie of life. There is a magic about music, and that's why it has held such powerful appeal to human beings in every culture throughout history. Music educators have something to give to the youth of America that no one else can give them; and it's something that, once given, can never be taken away. It is the beauty and joy of music. Let's make the most of this marvelous opportunity.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Paul R. Lehman
By Paul R. Lehman
Paul R. Lehman is professor emeritus of music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a former president of MENC.
