We have many wonderful music education experts here in Australia, and around the world, who each advocate for music education in their own way. You might think that such advocacy would be applauded by all who work in music education, especially when we seem to be agreed that the importance of the arts is diminished in our high-stakes, standardised-testing, numeracy-and-literacy centred educational world.
But it isn’t the case. Rather than celebrating one another, and especially those who manage to get the message “out there”, we tend to get stuck in the message. Is it the message I would have shared? Does their message diminish my message? Does their message diminish my music?
There’s a really good reason for this. We music teachers care about our subject deeply. Being a musician and/or a music teacher is central to our identity. By the time we train as music teachers, we’ve spent thousands of extra-curricular hours learning an instrument, or learning to sing, or learning songwriting/composing/producing, or memorising music theory, or sitting in ensembles rehearsing, and so on. Our musics go deep, as do the connected friendships that we form and the identities that we build and cement through adolescence toward adulthood. This is all good, human, stuff. And it makes us better teachers – passionate, driven, invested in our students and the similar lives and identities they’re building.
At the same time, and as my research has shown, this narrows our worldviews. We tend to value whatever musics we trained in, and their associated knowledges (history, theory, etc.), much higher than other musics. Many of us are open to other musics, and new ways of teaching music, but those values and value hierarchies may not change a whole lot even when we open up. This is natural, and an important part of our pre-service music teacher training at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music is to make future teachers aware of their biases and to instill an understanding of musical pluralism and why it’s important.
I ended up being one of those people standing up and saying things publicly more than I intended to be in 2024, and I expect that’s going to happen more in 2025. The reason for this was because our state government held an inquiry into Arts and music education and training. I wrote a somewhat rushed submission (on a plane to Finland, if I remember correctly), and was invited to give evidence at one of their public hearings. Then, while the Joint Select Committee were still in the process of the inquiry, our Education Standards Authority (NESA) released some regressive draft music syllabi for years 11 and 12 (something I had predicted in my opening statement to the Inquiry!).
The Inquiry published an excellent report, and included some of our ideas in its recommendations, as well as those by other stakeholders. I was incredibly impressed by the care and knowledge shared by the members of the committee, and by the transparency of government process – anyone can read every single submission and watch the videos of all of the evidence given (as well as read transcripts). In fact, it contrasted exactly with the opaque, secretive process that NESA follows to develop its syllabi. The report is excellent.
I expect this public advocacy work to be ongoing, because the government is due to respond to those excellent recommendations in a few months, and we expect to receive the final music syllabi this year, too. And I don’t look forward to more advocacy work. Why? Well, because of the values thing. Because music is so important to us, and our worldviews are so sticky, we still don’t celebrate advocacy, we attack the message. Over the last few months, I’ve been called a pompous nitwit who knows nothing, told my legacy will be having destroyed music education in NSW, told to be less emotional about music education, and all that kind of stuff. Luckily I’ve had much more thanks and encouragement for sticking my head above the parapet, I have pretty good self-worth anyway, and I understand that this is all part of being in the public eye. I’ve seen it happen again and again to colleagues who are much more eloquent speakers, much more famous, and with bigger platforms than I. But my point is that at the moment that we need to stand together, to stop our subject being sidelined, we have to put the values stuff aside, and we have to celebrate anyone who’s raising an issue.
Now that’s not to say we shouldn’t have robust discussions, arguments even, about who and what Music Education is for. As I explained above, those values and the resulting passion we bring to our subject make us better teachers, and if we can just summon a little pluralist critical thinking to remind ourselves of the potential pitfalls that come along with that, we can successfully being those strengths into our classrooms. We should certainly discuss methods, pedagogies, philosophy, musical cultures, and try to come up with curriculum that balances our many differing priorities (and more importantly, meets children and young people where they are and brings music learning into their lives). In fact, the Inquiry got a lovely broad taste of a wide variety of those differing priorities! (And I was so proud of us all, so articulately explaining what is important about music education to us.) But those discussions should be separate to a general defence of our subject in a time of threat.
And so that’s why we need a single message we can get behind. I’m going to propose one. Mine would be:
“Music for everyone”
Too simple? Maybe. Perhaps “Music-making for everyone” is better, but I think even that might create some arguments, because I’m not sure that everyone is agreed about what “making” is. After all, it can be quite different on a viola da gamba, duduk, gamelan, veena, and laptop. I think it really does have to be that simple for us to get behind, because even as soon as we start trying to explain what “music for everyone” might look like, many of us will get tangled in our values-based assumptions, and we’ll start disagreeing. But I think we can agree that every child in every school in Australia should have music in every day of their education until they get to the point where they’ve got the freedom to choose what they want to study. It is both intrinsicly and extrinsically good for our children to have music, and having music is an essential part of the human experience. As young people become adults and participate and contribute as valuable citizens, they should have the ability and choice to participate and contribute through music. Our country will be all the better for it.
Influenced by the Terms of Reference of the Inquiry, and in the excellent advocacy work of the Alberts/Tony Foundation in their Right from the Start campaign, the general adopted message at the moment seems to be “a right to a quality, sequential and ongoing music education”. What they mean by this is clearly explained on their website and in their excellent and beautifully-presented published articles (they told me they’re hoping to persuade principals, and I think they’ve done excellent work toward that!). They’ve also celebrated the impact of their work on the Joint Select Committee’s work, here.
Which is all great, except that “quality” is a word that summons all of that values-based stuff, and I can tell you right now we’re not all going to agree about what “quality” means; and I think “sequential” is massively problematic given the last 50 years of research on music education and how people learn music (often, haphazardly).
Wait! Aren’t I now doing exactly what I said we mustn’t do – cutting down the tall poppies who are successful in getting a message out, because it isn’t the exact message I’d have? Well, I hope not – my approach during this period has been to try to defer as much as possible to our national peak body, ASME, and to celebrate our time in the sun (i.e. the Inquiry), for which “quality sequential” has paid a big part. I’m very thankful for that.
Instead, what I’m hoping we might be able to do is learn from the experience of getting together to defend ourselves against secretive and backwards syllabus development, and to promote our field through a first-rate Inquiry, and just have a think about how we can stay together in the upcoming important months, and even on into the future. And I think “music for every child”, or something equally simple and devoid of any implied (musical-cultural) values is the way to do that. There is a time for focusing on our differences, arguing our corner, trying to persuade others or pointing out the weaknesses in their arguments; and there’s a time for focusing on where we agree. I think this year we should focus on the latter.
