Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth

MUSIC EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF VIRTUALITY AND POST-TRUTH

This is a deliberately provocative book crossing many disciplinary boundaries and locating music and art education within a context of contemporary social and political problems in a time of growing disruption and authoritarianism. Intended firstly for music teacher educators, practicing music teachers, and graduate and undergraduate music education majors, the book also speaks to arts and media studies teachers, parents, or others interested in exploring how composing, performing, improvising, conducting, listening, dancing, teaching, learning, or engaging in music or education criticism are all political acts because fundamentally concerned with social values and thus inseparable from power and politics. Among the book’s central themes are the danger of democratic deconsolidation in the West and how music education can help counter that threat through the fostering of democratic citizens who are aware of music’s ubiquity in their lives and its many roles in shaping public opinion and notions of truth, and for better or for worse! The arts can obviously be used for ill, but as George Orwell demonstrated in his own work, they can also be employed in defense of democracy as modes of political thought and action affording opportunities for the revitalization of society through its re-imagining. Paul G. Woodford is Professor of Music Education at the Don Wright Faculty of Music, the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His 2005 book Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice was credited with opening up new areas of scholarly endeavor in the field. Formerly Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (2005–2007), Dr. Woodford is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education (2015) and a member of the international advisory boards of the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, the British Journal of Music Education, and the Philosophy of Music Education Review.

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MUSIC EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF VIRTUALITY AND POST-TRUTH

Paul G. Woodford

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Paul G. Woodford The right of Paul G. Woodford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Woodford, Paul, 1955- author. Title: Music education in an age of virtuality and post-truth / Paul G. Woodford ; with a foreword by Richard Colwell. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018032993| ISBN 9781138322820 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138322844 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780429451775 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music--Instruction and study--Political aspects. | Education--Political aspects | Music--Political aspects Classification: LCC MT1 .W8905 2019 | DDC 780.71--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032993 ISBN: 978-1-138-32282-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-32284-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45177-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Foreword Preface

vi vii ix

1

Why I Write

1

2

It’s the economy, stupid

14

3

Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen?

28

4

Harperland and conservative disdain for music and the arts

46

5

The defeat of the schools

64

6

I Yam What I Yam

77

7

On The End of History and the global decline of music education?

92

8

On The Return of History: Toward a liberal music education

Bibliography Index

110 124 139

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to music education scholars Richard Colwell and Estelle Jorgensen for their support and mentorship throughout my academic career—for teaching me the value of professional criticism, and for encouraging me to be bold—and to my wife, Jill Ball, for daily reminding me to ‘think big thoughts.’ Thanks are also extended to doctoral student Laura Benjamins for assisting with the initial proofing of this book and to anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on preliminary drafts of the manuscript.

FOREWORD

Professor Woodford has been the profession’s visionary for the 21st century; first, with his groundbreaking book connecting democracy with music education, and now with this thought-provoking analysis of today’s crisis in education. He accomplishes this by cleverly weaving almost every contemporary political and educational issue into a tapestry that portrays the issues faced by arts and music educators in many parts of the world. Woodford argues that music and music education can be powerful tools in educating students to have the habits of mind that are essential to democratic citizenship. We music educators become so involved with an individualized pedagogy of skills and concepts that the Big Questions in education, culture, and society receive little time in our schedules. We know implicitly what is required for full understanding but mentioning the multiple connections of our work to the Big Questions is omitted. What is impressive about this book are the multiple disciplines (philosophy, history, political science, economics, the media and more) used to describe the human condition. Every student will be engaged in discussions, as one or more topics will be current and personal, as Woodford demonstrates (models) a breadth of knowledge from popular culture to our deepest philosophical ideas. Culture is a means of control and uses soft power through media; all of us can think of songs that moved us emotionally. What moves us doesn’t have to be recognized as great music, as Donald Trump has demonstrated that facts don’t matter. Woodford recognizes that many music educators lack the background in general education and in current events to appreciate the importance of democracy. Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (2011), documents that undergraduates are not developing the capacity for critical thinking and for complex reasoning. One only thinks critically and creatively in a specific subject requiring a breadth to one’s education. The Pulitzer prize historian David McCullough writes in The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For

viii Foreword

(2018) that what keeps him awake at night is that present leaders do not recognize the importance of stories that inspire actions in the face of uncertainty. He sees decisions being made on the basis of politics, and not on how great leaders have risen to turning points in history. Music has the potential for teaching democracy as evidenced by the success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, Hamilton, an exemplar civics lesson. The Muslims ban much music; Putin is expunging 1990s texts that promoted critical inquiry and western values. China has banned at least 120 rap songs due to words indicating questionable morals, undesirable ideologies, or visible tattoos; even Israel and Poland have censorship of educational materials. We realize today that much of Leonard Bernstein’s music had a political message. The educator Diane Ravitch, once she left the Washington bureaucracy, realized how theory works in practice, and that the standards movement resulted in a testing movement and school choice. She now states in Reign of Error (2013) that a citizen of a democratic society must be able to read critically, listen carefully, evaluate competing claims, weigh evidence, and come to a thoughtful judgment, recommendations that Woodford proposes. The 2010 Nobel laureate in literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, contends in Notes on the Death of Culture (2015) that the worst and most dangerous enemy of democracy is no longer communism, but populism, a point central to Woodford’s arguments. Rod Riemen similarly argues in To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism (2018) that much of the populist movement is a prelude to fascism. Trump’s election in 2016, and also the Brexit vote, may have been the Sputnik moment for civic education. The lack of trust in government is a price we are paying for not making democratic citizenship an urgent goal. Democracy is precarious, not only in the United States; Australia has a civics and citizenship project, Singapore character and citizenship, Hong Kong a national and moral education program, and character education in Canada. Woodford uses John Dewey as his guiding philosopher; and Dewey believed that education is fundamental to social progress and reform. Woodford’s championing civic literacy through music and interpreting history with truthful knowledge may help restore faith in democracy. Richard Colwell

PREFACE

My last book, Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics and the Politics of Practice, published in 2005, was in large part a reaction to the events of 9/11.1 Having watched, horrified, as the attacks were broadcast on television everywhere, I experienced a felt need to do something with my life that really mattered to the wider world beyond my own narrow field of music education, that rose above mere entertainment, performance, or music as an end unto itself. And as sometimes happens with those searching for meaning, serendipity came to my rescue when I stumbled upon Benjamin Barber’s 1996 book Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy.2 Barber reminded me that much of the strife in the Middle East and elsewhere was attributable to differences in, and disagreements over, culture, which as John Dewey said “is conditioned by art more than by any other one thing.”3 The reaction against the West in the Middle East was a response to the western assumption that we all wanted the same things and lifestyles. By the time my book was published, neoliberals and neoconservatives had been working assiduously for a quarter century through institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to colonize the world, and including its state education systems, to an essentially capitalist ideology based on free market economics. This larger theme of cultural and educational colonization vis-à-vis neoliberalism and neoconservatism is addressed throughout this book—although I don’t use the term colonization elsewhere—and especially in Chapters 7 and 8 in relation to Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay The End of History.4 Fukuyama prophesized the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989 would result in a world of greater uniformity and sameness owing to the victory of liberal democracy over communism. The ideology of liberal democracy to which Fukuyama referred, though, was virtually synonymous with neoliberal hedonism and thus amoral because denying the possibility and desirability of truth except in primarily economic terms.

x Preface

Cornel West described this reductive conception of liberal democracy in Orwellian terms as a fetishized “nihilistic market-dominated mentality” based on the pursuit of wealth, power, and a corresponding and authoritarian “drive for conquest” that subverted democracy by stifling dissent, allowing an “imperialist nihilism” to prevail.5 Fukuyama was not entirely correct in his prophecy of global ideological, social, and cultural conformity, but there can be no denying that the world became a smaller place between 1989 and the Great Recession of 2008 as economic, educational, and political systems converged more than ever before. Canadian scholar Jennifer Welsh, however, argued in her 2016 book The Return of History that the 2008 recession and seemingly unending chaos in the Middle East resulting in massive immigration have combined shaken the faith of many citizens in the West in their respective democratic governments and institutions. There is reason to worry that the western world may be entering a period of political disruption as the voting patterns of relatively large segments of the populations in the United States, Britain, France, Austria, and elsewhere become less predictable and in ways that might eventually threaten the very existence of liberal democracies! Few political scientists, for example, predicted the results of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom or Donald Trump’s electoral success in 2016. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk similarly warn in a 2016 analysis of World Values Surveys conducted between 1995 to 2015 that there is indeed a danger of democratic deconsolidation as increasing numbers of citizens, and particularly disaffected millennials, “endorse single-issue movements, vote for populist candidates, or support ‘antisystem’ parties that define themselves in opposition to the status quo.”6 Among the latter authors’ most troubling findings is an increase in tolerance of authoritarianism among the citizenry of some western nations. Whereas only 16 percent of Americans born in the 1970s, for example, regarded democracy as a “bad political system for their country,” by 2011 that number had risen to 24 percent of younger citizens.7 Even more worryingly, 32 percent of Americans from all age brackets combined apparently now believe “it would be better to have a ‘strong leader’ who does not have to ‘bother with parliament and elections.’” Democracy, they conclude, “is in a serious state of disrepair!”8 This tension between neoliberal globalization (that was promoted most aggressively by conservatives) and the threat of democratic disruption evolved into the analytical frame for this book as it was being researched and written. I began my writing with a critique of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies shaping all education, including music education, and how they threatened whatever democratic purpose they might traditionally have had. As my manuscript took shape through the seemingly interminable American Presidential campaign of 2016, however, it became impossible to ignore the even greater threat to democracy, and to public education, posed by populist leaders such as Trump. More than a decade ago, John Lukacs warned in Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred that we live in an age of popular sovereignty in which the preferred modus operandi of politicians, and whether liberal or conservative, democrat or republican, is “the accumulation of opinions.”9

Preface xi

Trump is only the latest iteration of populist leader to resort to ‘the accumulation of opinions’ that can be easily “molded, formed, falsified, [or] inflated” according to his wonts.10 This is why it is so important for children and youth to have a liberal education in which they are challenged to think more critically about their worlds so as to become more aware of “how they choose to think, including how they are influenced or impressed to think and speak.”11 This admonition applies to music and art education as much as it does to language instruction because also potentially powerful tools of persuasion. Indeed, this book was inspired in part by George Orwell’s short essay “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda.” First published in 1941 and broadcasted on the BBC Oversees Service, that essay was much later included in a collection of his essays entitled All Art is Propaganda.12 The argument is made in this present book that music’s potential for swaying people in their beliefs and ways of thinking is sometimes or in some ways greater than that of language and thus ought to be taken more seriously in education. All of the arts contribute in important ways to the shaping of opinion and notions of truth, but music, owing to its ubiquity, fluidity, and directness of emotional expression, can more readily subvert or overwhelm people’s intellectual defenses rendering them more vulnerable to “deception, evasion, hate, groupthink, and the worship of power.”13 As is explained in greater length in the conclusion to Chapter 8, the purpose of a liberal music education is two-fold, firstly, to help students decipher and perhaps expose and oppose the intentions of those creating, performing, playing, or otherwise using music for possibly nefarious purposes, and, secondly, as Orwell expressed it, to challenge “even the most cherished wisdom” and “all of the smelly orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls” and that would limit or stifle thought.14 Some readers may not appreciate my critical analyses of populist leaders such as Trump and of popular media and culture in these pages because challenging sacred myths, such as the myth of American military forbearance epitomized in the Popeye cartoon I Yam What I Yam and discussed in Chapter 6 with respect to the function of music therein in its perpetuation. But as Orwell also said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”15 This is a fundamental human right in any democracy warranting the name because a protection from politicians or their ‘Thought Police’ who would “suppress ideas before any words are spoken.”16 Music and the arts can obviously be used for ill, but, as Orwell demonstrated convincingly in his own work, they can also be employed in the defense of democracy as a corrective to deliberate lies or distortions of truth while affording opportunities for the revitalization of society through its re-imagining. Orwell certainly thought of his own work as serving this political purpose. As stated in his short book Why I Write, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for [italics his] democratic socialism.”17 That has long been my own purpose. Lest some readers are surprised to find a book such as this one relating music and music education to problems of Orwellian authoritarianism and thought control, it

xii Preface

is worth noting that Orwell realized that children’s first encounter with authoritarianism was typically in the school. Too often within those hallowed halls, and also in university, “rules and authority matter more than genuine learning” resulting in the conditioning of children and youth for an adulthood in which they do as they are told.18 This is as much a problem in formal music instruction as in any other school subject, and perhaps more so for the reason that music continues to be taught in schools primarily through large performance ensembles and for its own sake, in isolation from the world and its problems, and so, by time they enter university, relatively few have ideas of their own, or at least not ones they are initially willing to share with faculty. Nor is there much inclination among music teachers and curriculum writers to encourage children and youth to think more broadly, deeply, and critically about the music in their everyday lives and how it continues to influence, often profoundly, their perceptions and understandings of truth. This is partly owing to lack of instructional time in an already crowded curriculum but also to music teacher training programs that continue to emphasize performance methods over philosophy and sociology because ascribing to the long-held myth of the desired political neutrality of schools. I think Orwell would approve of a deliberately provocative—some might say daring—book such as this one, and especially in this time of political and economic disruption and growing authoritarianism, just as I hope practicing teachers will not perceive my work as an attack on their profession or as unpatriotic but as a necessity in a time when alternate facts, truthiness, lies, myths, and other distortions of truth and reality prevail, and including in educational institutions. In the end, and as is explained in the conclusion of this book, it is up to readers to judge for themselves the veracity of the meanings they encounter here or elsewhere. The only thing I ask of them is that, before accepting or rejecting what they read, they critically analyse ideas and truth claims while doing their own research to provide an intellectual basis for their decision-making and so avoid relying on mere opinion and personal experience because overly limiting. To borrow a metaphorical turn of phrase from Chris Hedges in Death of the Liberal Class, a liberal music education such as the kind of approach proposed and modelled in the following chapters “gives people a language by which they can understand themselves and their society,” revealing important truths about themselves and society so they can plan for a future based on a firmer foundation than before.19

Notes 1 Paul Woodford, Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics and the Politics of Practice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). 2 Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996). 3 John Dewey, Art As Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 327. 4 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. 5 Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 39–40.

Preface xiii

6 Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy, 27, no. 3 (July 2016), 6. 7 Ibid., 8. 8 Ibid., 6. As Foa and Mounk observe, whereas only 5 percent of well-to-do Americans expressed approval for army rule in the mid-1990s, that percentage has since risen to 16 percent (13). 9 John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 45. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 47. 12 George Orwell, “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,” broadcasted on the BBC Overseas Service, May 29, 1941, http://orwell.ru/library/articles/frontiers/english/e_ front See also his collected essays entitled All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, with an Introduction by Keith Gessen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2008). 13 Michael Sheldon, “The Year of Living Dangerously, Again,” Globe and Mail, January 28, 2017, p. R13. Sheldon is author of Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 14 George Orwell, quoted by Sheldon in “The year of Living Dangerously, Again,” R13. 15 Ibid. These are Sheldon’s words explaining some of Orwell’s ideas. 16 Ibid. 17 George Orwell, Why I Write (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1984), 8. 18 Sheldon, “The Year of Living Dangerously, Again,” R13. 19 Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 113.

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1 WHY I WRITE

The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence. Attributed to Vladimir Lenin, in Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

In his short essay Why I Write, first published in 1946, George Orwell identified “four great motives” for writing that were found in all serious writers, albeit in different degrees and sometimes varying in proportion according to individual circumstances such as family background and life experiences. Those motives were 1) “sheer egoism,” 2) “aesthetic enthusiasm,” 3) “historical impulse,” and 4) “political purpose.” Sheer egoism involved the wish to be remembered coupled with a determination “to live their own lives to the end” while avoiding the drudgery of over-conformity.1 In today’s academic language, we would perhaps say they were determined to have their own voices and make original contributions to society or to their fields of endeavor. Musicians and artists especially will identify with the motive of aesthetic enthusiasm, which Orwell described in terms of the perception of beauty but also “in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story,” and in the desire to share ideas the writer thought important.2 Historical impulse referred to the “desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”3 Last, but not least, was political purpose. Orwell regarded this as especially important to the quality of one’s writing because intimately concerned with matters of meaning, truth, and justice. “When I sit down to write a book,” he stated, I do not say to myself, “I am going to write a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.4

2 Why I Write

Political purpose, however, did not require that the writer abnegate aesthetic enthusiasm. “I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”5 But when lacking an explicit political purpose, “I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally.”6 In any event, writing was inevitably a political act because shaped by one’s political biases. The challenge for writers was to become conscious of them so they could “act politically without sacrificing … aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”7 This essay and Orwell’s other journalistic writings and novels appeal to me for a variety of reasons, among them his determination to confront deceit and other distortions of truth that, left uncontested, might warp the public’s perception of truth and reality. I also share with him a commitment to social democracy and a recognition of the importance of knowing history. All four of the above motives articulated by him certainly apply to me and my own writing. Posterity matters, and I labor intensively over my own research and quality of writing to convey information and ideas as accurately, clearly, and directly as possible, although I do not regard myself as an artist. In Chapter 5, readers will see that I do not think enough undergraduates realize the many challenges of trying to think and write well, any more than they realize the importance of having intellectual sparks and political interests of their own as essential motivating forces for their work. In too many cases, intellectual curiosity and political interests are extinguished in schools and universities because those institutions portray themselves as technological, politically neutral, and socially abstract and thus value-free when nothing can be further from the truth! Although often regarded as having a democratic purpose—if they are thought to have any political purpose at all—they now serve primarily capitalist interests. University administrators pay lip service to the arts and humanities but, as is explained in chapter five, are often in collusion with business in confusing job training with education.8 In my own field of music education, for example, curricula emphasize skill development, pedagogical methods, the acquisition of knowledge, national standards, and degree outcomes instead of teaching students how to research and develop arguments so they can think more critically about what they read, are told, see, hear, or do. Critical thinking is similarly reduced to politically neutral and thus socially abstract and purportedly value-free technical skills, which is also a distortion of truth because it favors the political status quo. Missing from current mainstream definitions of critical thinking is much, if any, recognition of the history of the concept as involving political and moral agency and as important to the pursuit of the good life, as opposed to a life of consumer goods. Music education and other undergraduates are seldom encouraged to seriously question or otherwise challenge the existing political system. Rather the opposite. Undergraduates are generally not expected to make conscious and critically examine their political beliefs and assumptions, let alone explore how their chosen profession has always been shaped through history by all manner of people and events and is thus inherently political!

Why I Write 3

This lack of critical thinking and demand for truth is as much a societal as an educational problem that philosopher John Dewey presciently warned of in the mid-1920s when he prophesized that the United States was moving toward an oligarchy of the rich that distrusted the judgment of the public unless “weighted down by heavy prejudice.”9 Critical thinking as he conceived it was never really tolerated in American schools because it was perceived as a threat to conservatives and the religious right. Dewey might just as easily have been describing American politics today with its preponderance of political spin doctors whose purpose is to shape the public’s perceptions of truth and reality. He employed the term “indoctrination” to describe how citizens were inducted uncritically into their educational or other beliefs. The popular television series The Newsroom starring Jeff Daniels as a curmudgeonly anchorman illustrated this problem of indoctrination of the American public in its inaugural program in 2012 when, in a college debate, Daniel’s character Will McEvoy was goaded into addressing the question “what makes America the greatest country in the world?” The audience of university students and professors was taken aback—shocked—when he launched into “an almighty (factually accurate, statistically) rant about why America is NOT the world’s greatest country.”10 The belief held by probably most Americans that their country is the greatest in the world was revealed to be based on what Cornell West describes as a naïve innocence and careless disregard for truth and historical realities.11 McEvoy’s harangue, which was in two parts, made for riveting television. Probably most viewers regarded the first part as the more powerful of the two because it utilized strident and contentious language devoid of music or other distractions. The second half of the speech, however, illustrates how music and the arts are often implicated in indoctrination by masking myths, lies, or half-truths so they can more readily penetrate people’s intellectual defenses. Following a brief cadence and pause in McEvoy’s harangue at the end of part one, he begins to romanticize America’s past to the accompaniment of a reflective and poignant music that signals a change in emotional tone in preparation for the sentimental statement that America was once great. “We sure used to be … We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths are, and we never beat our chest.”12 Several of McEvoy’s claims with respect to America’s former greatness, but by no means all, are eviscerated in Chapters 6 and 7. As media critic Neil Postman similarly complained with respect to the encroachment of music into the news (see Chapter 6), the music in the latter part of McEvoy’s rant set the tone for what followed, signaling to viewers how they should feel and reassuring them of their country’s essential greatness by sentimentalizing the past. Whereas in the first part of his harangue, McEvoy exposed patriotic rhetoric as factually inaccurate, the latter part camouflaged it with music intended to appeal to viewers’ emotions, just as McEvoy’s words drew on the myth of American exceptionalism to confirm them in their belief. Numerous similar examples and testimony to music’s power in influencing people’s political or other beliefs, and in often subtle ways operating beneath their conscious awareness, are presented throughout this book. These examples are

4 Why I Write

intended for curricular use in schools and music teacher education programs where the hope is they will inspire students to go beyond surface appearances and rhetoric to unearth the underlying ideological beliefs, assumptions, motives, and intentions of those who would use music or the other arts for their own ends. Orwell’s warning that “thought corrupts language” and vice versa applies equally to music and art and, as explained in the latter part of this book, is particularly relevant in this age of virtuality when young people’s perceptions of reality and truth are increasingly shaped by music and art saturated social and other media.13 Chapter 4, for example, excavates former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s motives for disparaging so-called elite musicians and artists while employing popular music performance as a Machiavellian tool for currying favor amongst the masses. The chapter historicizes Harper’s disdain for those musicians and artists, many of whom were social progressives, by locating it within the context of the rise and spread of American neoconservatism and an attendant aestheticization of politics that provided an intellectual foundation for a populist politics in which the arts became sites for moral reprobation. Harper and his conservatives were in power from 2006 through most of 2015, when they were replaced by the liberal government of Justin Trudeau. One of the challenges of researching and writing a book such as this one that attempts to draw on philosophy, political science, sociology, media studies, economics, and history (among other things) to analyze contemporary and/or recent politics affecting education is that things change, and sometimes unpredictably and quickly. Few, for example, would have predicted the success of the Eurosceptics in the Brexit referendum of 2016 that led to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s resignation, or Donald Trump’s success to the initial dismay of neoconservative policy elites in co-opting the Republican Party.14 As addressed in Chapters 7 and 8, we might well be on the cusp of a change in public sentiment in certain quarters as Trump and other political leaders continue to harness the dissatisfaction of older white males and others in neoliberal globalization, free trade, and immigration patterns to effect changes in government and public policy. Although possibly appalled by Trump’s attacks on the nation’s institutions and constitutional rights, many music or other teachers may find some of his ideas about education appealing because of potentially allowing more space for the arts in the school curriculum, just as his criticisms of free trade may provoke needed changes in economic policy. Indeed, even the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), one of the key supranational institutions driving neoliberal globalization and free trade for the past several decades, now admits the need for a more inclusive and equitable economic model that better redistributes the wealth to ensure a decent living standard for those marginalized or excluded from the economy by the outsourcing of manufacturing and, as is explained shortly, the burgeoning of ever-more sophisticated and ubiquitous technologies. There is now general recognition that something must be done to better redress economic disparities lest they provoke increasing social unrest and instability. As readers will learn in this book, music and arts education can play important roles in assuaging social instability

Why I Write 5

through the fostering of democratic citizenship and by contributing to social and cultural well-being.

A surveillance culture in education Global politics since the Great Recession of 2008 have been stormy, but the aforementioned dissatisfaction of many voters in neoliberalism and the subsequent economic and military disruption and instability experienced in many parts of the world of late might afford arts and humanities teachers’ opportunities to better secure the future of their school and university programs. If they are to accomplish that goal, however, they will need to publicly champion, and in the case of music educators also enlarge, their own vision of education as important not just to the economy but also to the life well-lived. More than ever before, they will need to screw up their courage to publicly engage in politics, and beginning in their own institutions, to challenge the neoliberal discourse that continues to predominate therein. Neoliberal New Public Management (NPM) organizational principles have for so long been embedded in our institutional cultures as to appear natural and therefore right, true, inevitable, and thus highly resistant to change. Chris Lorenz described NPM as a self-referential discourse involving authoritarian “managerial control regimes” that are demotivating to faculty because requiring that they be subject to continuous surveillance and degrading accountability measures that impinge on their academic freedoms.15 Professors and teachers are no longer trusted to be accountable for themselves as professionals. Policies and managerial practices are imposed on them and with little room or opportunity for discussion or debate, a situation that Lorenz describes as “reminiscent of state Communism” and totalitarian because leaving “no institutionalized room for criticism, which it sees as subversion.”16 This is certainly the case in my own institution where, for example, music faculty were recently “told” by the university administration to reduce degree requirements for purely economic reasons. More is said of this surveillance culture in today’s schools and universities below and in Chapter 5. The present danger for music and arts teachers at all levels is that the neoliberal solution to economic inequity might be a doubling-down on education, advising governments to fulfill their essential role in assisting those being displaced to adapt and adjust to global competition through world-beating skills training and education, and to promote innovation in the goods and services we produce while opening new markets in which to sell them.17 Rather than seizing the moment to call for educational reform that will speak to the human condition and spirit as much as economics, they would advise governments to ratchet up educational competition and skills training more than ever before.18 As suggested in Chapter 5 in relation to neoliberal education reform affecting music education, this plan is not likely to remediate economic inequality overmuch

6 Why I Write

because involving permanent instability among the workforce and requiring the development of ever-higher and sophisticated levels of skills that are beyond the capacity and interest of many workers. But even if it were possible to continuously retrain large contingents of workers to permanently march to the tune of industry and corporations, many of those future jobs are likely to be relegated to machines, leaving a significant proportion of the populace permanently unemployed or more dependent than at present on precarious work.19 It is with good reason that the history of the past century and continuing to the present has been described as a “race between education and technology.”20 Also addressed below is the rise of artificial intelligence and sophisticated digital devices that might have similar implications for music education, including teacher education and, at least at first glance, employment as fewer musical skills and less teacher guidance will be needed for children to “make” music. The latter has already been evident with the rise of interest among teachers in the informal music learning practices of popular musicians since the publication of Lucy Green’s seminal book How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education in 2001.21 iPads and other digital devices have already made significant inroads into music education and might eventually replace traditional instruments requiring more physical exertion and coordination and affording greater opportunities for visceral and sensual experience, such as is involved in playing the trumpet or clarinet.

Why children require a music education Patrick Jones, one of the few visionaries in the field of music education, proposes that this is all the more reason why children require a music education, and including the development of reasonable levels of musical skill, lest their musical experience and sense of identity become completely mediated by the music—and one should add the computer—industry.22 While of course by no means against the development of children’s musical skills, my response to Jones’s proposition is that the music teaching profession’s obsession with performance has resulted in the devaluing of music in education. Relatively few children enrolled in school music programs ever develop the skills required to pursue careers in music or become accomplished amateurs; nor have the OECD’s researchers found much evidence that the skills acquired in music performance classes are transferable to subjects thought to be more useful and important to the workforce (although, as is explained in Chapter 2, in the case of critical thinking that is likely owing to a lack of adequate definition). While Jones’s idea of helping children develop and protect their musical independence because important to the formation of their personal identities is educationally valid and worth pursuing, it is not sufficient unto itself to assure the future of music education for the reason that, unlike language, music is seldom regarded in education as a powerful because persuasive mode of expression and communication through which our perceptions of reality and truth, among probably many other things, are shaped. We will return to this idea of the persuasive potential of

Why I Write 7

music momentarily because, I contend, it provides a stronger rationale for the continued inclusion and strengthening of music and the arts in education than claims of “art for art’s sake,” transfer of skills, or the need for future professional or amateur musicians alone because of serious consequence to all children—and not just to those learning how to perform—with respect to how they come to know and potentially contribute to the shaping of their worlds. First, though, I need to say a few words to allay fears of what is perceived among some music teachers internationally to be the beginnings of a global decline in student enrolment in their classes in consequence of the historical neoliberal obsession with economics and standardized testing, coupled with the above-mentioned burgeoning computerization of jobs. These problems too are addressed at greater length elsewhere in this book, and beginning in Chapter 2, which is entitled “It’s the economy, stupid.” Taken together, these developments may have caused parents to question the practicality of future employment in and relevance of music instruction for their children, since high school graduates are recruited and assessed for possible admittance to university music and music teacher education programs based primarily on their performing ability. Thus far, the employment situation for musicians, artists, and music teachers is by no means necessarily dire, although there are significant challenges. Chapter 2 presents employment figures in the performing arts showing that music and arts jobs are not so very different from many other occupations with respect to shifting rates of employment in response to economic events such as the Great Recession of 2008. Nor have those shifting rates of employment in the performing arts always been downward. The performing arts combined remain a major industry that is more substantial in size and number of jobs than many other industries thought to be important to the economy and worthy of government financial support. Someone must train those arts workers for their future employment, although, as just stated, the training of musicians alone does not provide an adequate rationale to justify music education for all children, and especially in this age of digitization when lack of expertise is no longer as much of a barrier to music-making. Moreover, the authors of a 2013 groundbreaking study examining the susceptibility of 702 occupations to future computerization ranked teachers, artists, and musicians all relatively low in probability of replacement by machines.23 Significantly, the chief criteria for their lower ranking in susceptibility to computerization were that they involved the exercise of social intelligence and persuasion, neither of which is amenable to reduction to “well-defined procedures that can easily be performed by sophisticated algorithms.”24 It almost goes without saying that music teaching and learning are fundamentally about the exercise and development in children of social intelligence as they create, listen, dance to, conduct, analyze, perform, or otherwise participate in music while learning how it relates to the wider world in which they live. The educational purpose of those classes is as much—or should be—to socialize children into their humanity as it is to teach music. The two should to be inseparable in music education! Classroom music pedagogy is ultimately about teaching children how to

8 Why I Write

live, collaborate, or work together purposefully in ensemble toward some collective musical or other end, albeit usually a concert performance, the success of which depends on the fostering of positive social relationships involving the exercise of empathy, discipline, and personal and social responsibility. The late Christopher Small argued convincingly in Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening that those activities were ultimately relational. “There is no such thing as music,” he declared, by which he meant that music was not an object because literally only existing in the moment and in the imagination as it unfolds through time.25 It was instead something that people did together; hence his coining of the term musicking to better reflect its social interactional or relational character. Probably most music teachers, though, would be initially surprised upon reading here that music is a powerful tool or mode of persuasion. I like the term persuasion (or even better “suasion”) as it applies to music education because implying intentionality and purposefulness, reminding all concerned of the necessity of engaging in ethical evaluation when attempting to understand those socio-musical relationships by going beyond the notes themselves to identify, and if necessary infer and sometimes criticize, the motives and intentions of others as they compose, perform, dance, listen to, or otherwise use music for their own ends. Philosopher Randal Marlin, in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, similarly recommends that when analyzing what is thought to be propaganda and other forms of manipulation or deceit students should attempt to identify the sources, intended messages, means of communication, political assumptions, myths, or other factors important to understanding its political context, including “Who stands to gain?”26 All of this should be coupled with a healthy dose of critical and ethical selfreflection with respect to one’s own motives and intentions for musical or other action while attempting to avoid or minimize “dubious imputation of intention” to others.27 What should be at the forefront of music education pedagogy, to extend Small’s argument, is personal and collective analysis of the nature of those socio-musical relationships, which in music education requires that children be frequently reminded of the necessity of asking the who, what, when, where, how, to, with, or for whom, and, most importantly of all, why of music so they can have some hope of understanding it as humanly constructed and thus deeply implicated in the joys, moral frailties, and turpitude of the human condition. The word persuasion is not typically found in the music education lexicon, but it should be given its ubiquity in our media and music and art saturated world, and because central to critical thinking and thereby to the development of personal moral agency and voice. One thinks critically in the Deweyan sense not just to formulate and test ideas, arguments, and truth claims about the state of the world but to defend one’s intellectual freedom while engaging in moral witnessing and suasion with respect to the good society and the amelioration of social problems. It is a quality that uniquely sets humans apart from machines because an exercise in caring about others and their problems, which implies that whatever teachers and their pupils do in their classes or performances should be meaningful and ethically and morally justifiable in the deepest sense of the terms.28 Where music education fails to

Why I Write 9

persuade it is when teachers and students treat music as socially abstract and mechanical by forgetting to go beyond mere technicalities—the notes and rhythmic figures that are all too easily replicated by machines—to create what Dewey called “an experience” that is emotionally and intellectually moving, or persuasive, because enhancing awareness of “the human contribution” and condition.29

The last post The famous military bugle call “The Last Post” was chosen as the subtitle for this section of Chapter 1 because it is a useful metaphor for the condition of music and arts education as teachers worry about the continued viability of their chosen professions in the present while nervously anticipating a future of rapidly increasing technological development that will render many occupations redundant or obsolete. As suggested above, the world has already seen the replacement of many occupations by computers. The very idea of service industries has already undergone rapid change with the rise of autonomous driverless cars, automated store checkouts, robo financial advisors, travel search engines, and innumerable other service jobs whose survival has been seriously compromised by on-line computer software systems. Even workers in occupations thought to be safe from computerization are impacted by the decline of the service industry and jobs because now required to assume responsibilities formerly performed by service staff. This, of course, is not to say that some occupations have not benefited from digitization and computerization, for example, those requiring high level cognitive and managerial skills requiring access to big data, legal files, or market information.30 It is just that the rapid advance of computerization is increasingly forcing even many of those workers to engage in automated self-services that arguably negatively impact their productivity and quality of life because harried by demands for ever greater efficiency and accountability. Throughout my own university career, for example, there has been a gradual and continuing decline in service for faculty as they are expected to perform clerical work for themselves on-line. Face to face human interaction and hands on assistance are viewed by administration as human resources that are inefficient and therefore disposable.31 This has been done in the name of neoliberal efficiency, but it is literally a transfer of work as part of an administrative conception and policy of a totalizing productivity among faculty that is dehumanizing while negatively impacting individuals’ productivity and quality of work because now responsible for bureaucratic tasks on top of their already full load of scholarly work, teaching, or other professional activities. In consequence, many of today’s professors, but also school teachers, are too busy and distracted to protest what Henry Giroux and other critics describe as a neoliberal (and formerly under Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now possibly Donald Trump, neoconservative or even alt-right) takeover of education.32 My over-arching purpose of this book, and of almost everything that I have written in the past quarter century, has been to address the societal and political developments impacting music or other teachers in the present while anticipating

10 Why I Write

future challenges so they can better defend themselves and their students, and ultimately democratic society, from those who would pervert the purpose of education by reducing it to job training and/or thought control. Like Orwell and Aldous Huxley, I write to warn of signs in the present of the possibility of a future 1984 or Brave New World of virtually total control of human thought and behavior in which people’s perceptions of their world are shaped by oppressive ideologies or regimes of thought and power in which music, language, and the arts are implicated, and particularly via mass media, technology, and education, that are seldom questioned because taken for granted as truth. “The Last Post” is commonly associated today with death because it has long been performed at Remembrance or Memorial Day ceremonies or military funerals, but it was originally employed by the British Army during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as one of a number of bugle calls to communicate with troops in the field. Whereas “The First Post,” for example, signaled the end of the day and the commencement of inspection of sentry posts by the duty officer, “The Last Post” signaled the final sentry post had been inspected and all was well.33 The camp was secure for the night. The latter is the intended meaning of this subtitle, that music or other teachers can work to secure their own professions and programs if they take the appropriate measures to demonstrate convincingly—to persuade government, children, and their parents—that those programs really matter because their subjects are strongly implicated, and for better or for worse, in the shaping of culture and thereby also of consciousness and society. Thus far, music teachers still have a choice: They can choose to continue teaching as they have before, focusing almost exclusively on performance in a social and political vacuum, in which case the modern meaning of “The Last Post” as commemorating the dead might eventually apply. As already suggested, this traditional approach to music education based on the “art for art’s sake” rationale that Orwell skewered in his 1941 essay “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda” has long rendered music teaching and learning overly narrow, leaving children more vulnerable to the pervasive and sometimes corrosive effects of music while contributing to their political disfranchisement. Nor is the status quo likely to stem a decline in enrolment in those programs and classes, rather the reverse and because moribund, and for the obvious reason that any decline is likely attributable to a societal change in the (de)valuing of music instruction that needs to be confronted politically, that is publicly and loudly, because overlooking the obvious fact that music is a powerful force in children’s lives, and sometimes for the worse! Music education is accordingly far too important to the education of the great masses of children in the deepest sense of developing critical awareness of its power to create or corrupt, that is, to be used or abused, for its decline or extinction in schools to be tolerated. Tim Wu, in his 2016 book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads about the history of advertising and media, is making a similar argument as I am in explaining how the product of the news and other media is not content but readership whose personal information is then sold to advertisers, and how this has given rise to a culture of the “most outrageous and outlandish”

Why I Write 11

that “made Donald Trump.”34 Whereas advertisements were formerly encountered relatively infrequently, they are now ubiquitous in our lives as advertisers comb the internet and social media searching for “time and spaces previously walled off from commercial exploitation, gathering up chunks and then slivers of our un-harvested awareness.”35 It goes without saying that music is heavily implicated in this shaping of contemporary culture and society through the “harvesting of awareness.” As already suggested but bears repetition, this is good reason for its inclusion as both a practical and academic subject in schools and where, together with media and other arts-related subjects, it should be subjected to intense critical scrutiny so children can learn to interpret their musical and wider worlds so less dependent for their decisionmaking on parents, politicians, peers, their teachers, the media, or industry. The latter book’s title is particularly appropriate to the conclusion of this chapter for the reason that the arts are figuratively, and often literally, in the advertising and attention-seeking business. To paraphrase Dewey and media guru Marshall McLuhan, it is not so much the content, or what is produced, that is most important in media and other forms of communication as it is how it is presented. And that is the province of the arts, of which music, as Dewey said, is simultaneously both the highest and the lowest! “Sounds,” he explained, “have the power of direct emotional expression. A sound is itself threatening, whining, soothing, depressing, fierce, tender, soporific in its quality.”36 It is the “most immediately and intensely practical of all the bodily organs (since it incites most strongly to impulsive action).” While retaining “the primitive power of sounds to denote the clash of attacking and resisting forces and all accompanying phases of emotional movement,” it also expresses “incredibly varied complexities of question, uncertainty, and suspense” that can intrigue, overwhelm, and oft-times clamor for our attention.37 Music is not only “more widespread, much more independent of special cultivation than any other art,” but is seductive, lowering peoples’ inhibitions as they enter into a “realm where excitations are given unrestricted rein.”38 Given this description, it is no wonder that music figures so prominently in advertising, business, politics, the military, entertainment, religion, and everyday life. What is surprising is that the value of music education is not generally understood and appreciated in education, where it all too frequently continues to be treated as only polite entertainment or skill-building and thus only a frill and not particularly important in the preparation of children for life.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Orwell, Why I Write, 5. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid., 10. Orwell personally experienced poverty and authoritarianism as a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and then totalitarianism as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–37.

12 Why I Write

7 Ibid., 8. 8 Chris Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You Under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management,” Critical Inquiry, 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 599–629. 9 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1946), 204. 10 Piers Morgan, “Jeff Daniels Rants On Why America is Not the Greatest Nation, A Fact that Would be Alien to Most Americans,” Daily Mail, June 30, 2012, www.dailymail.co. uk/home/moslive/article-2166094/Piers-Morgan-Jeff-Daniels-rants-America-NOTworlds-greatest-nation-fact-alien-Americans.html 11 West, Democracy Matters. 12 Morgan, “Jeff Daniels Rants.” 13 Orwell, Why I Write, 116. 14 See Daniel Larison, “Will the Neoconservatives abandon the GOP?” (posted April 19, 2016), www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/will-the-neoconservatives-abandonthe-gop/ After winning the election, however, Trump appointed several prominent neoconservatives to his advisory board, including Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, suggesting that he was mending the fences with the ideological wing of the Republican Party. 15 Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart,” 600, 608. 16 Ibid. 17 Edward Greenspon and Kevin Lynch, “The World Is Ripe for New Economic Thinking,” Globe and Mail, October 1, 2016, p. B4. 18 See also Debra Humphreys, “More for Less? The Quality Imperative in the ‘Brave New World’ of Higher Education,” featuring a list of essential learning outcomes for higher education prepared by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2013, and available at www.aacu.org/leap. This list was compiled with the help of the business community “and analysis of the accreditation requirements for engineering, business, nursing, and teacher education” (n.p.). 19 Journalist Margaret Wente observed in “America’s Hidden Crisis: Men Not at Work,” Globe and Mail, October 15, 2016, that this has already happened. In addition to the many Americans who are under-employed there is a significant number of young men, about seven million if Wente is correct, who have elected not to work, www.theglobea ndmail.com/authors/margaret-wente 20 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osbourne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” Paper presented at the Machines and Employment Workshop hosted by the Engineering Sciences Department and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, Oxford University, September 17, 2013, p. 10, www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_ Future_of_Employment.pdf 21 Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001). 22 Patrick M. Jones, “The Future of School Bands: Wind Ensemble Paradigm,” Journal of Band Research, 43, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 1–27. 23 Frey and Osbourne, “The Future of Employment.” Elementary and other teachers and teachers were ranked 20th and 48th on a scale from 1 to 702 with 1 being least susceptible to computerization. Music directors and composers were ranked 72nd, and Musicians and singers ranked 155th. Postsecondary teachers were ranked 112th. 24 Ibid. The authors’ gloomy estimate that “47 percent of total US employment is at risk” of eventual computerization would tend to suggest the prospects of future employment for teachers and artists are far better than those for many other occupations (1). 25 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 2, 218. 26 Randal Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press, 2013), 336.

Why I Write 13

27 Ibid., 114. 28 Ibid. Ethics is defined by Marlin as “a systematic study aimed at discerning which rules and forms of thought and behavior will contribute to a better existence and which will not” (139). 29 Dewey, Art As Experience. The term “The Human Experience” is the title of Chapter 11 (245–271). 30 Frey and Osbourne, “The Future of Employment,” 12. 31 Tim Jackson, “Let’s Be Less Productive,” New York Times, May 26, 2012, www.nytimes. com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/lets-be-less-productive.html 32 Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014). 33 Alwyn W. Turner, “The Story of the Last Post,” BBC News Magazine, November 11, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34768398 34 Simon Houpt, “Fighting Back Against an Ad-Seized Media: The Attention Merchants Writer Considers How a Reliance on Advertising Revenue Heightened Sensationalism and Helped Build Trump,” Globe and Mail, November 5, 2016, p. R4. 35 Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Knopf, 2016), in “Review: Tim Wu’s ‘The Attention Merchants’ Charts the Battle for Our Mental Landscape,” by Michael Harris, Globe and Mail, October 21, 2016, p. R17, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-tim-wus-theattention-merchants-charts-the-battle-for-our-mental-landscape/article32468588/?cmp id=rss1 36 Dewey, Art As Experience, 238. 37 Ibid., 239. 38 Ibid., 238.

2 IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. Attributed to George Orwell

An economic purpose for music education It is a truism that we live in a materialistic society in which people are often obsessed with money and in which nearly everything, and including government, culture, education, media, food, health care, science, and the military now has to be justified as contributing to the defense and growth of capitalism. Ever since the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, American public schools have been blamed by corporate executives and some politicians and media pundits for the country’s economic reverses because they have failed to create a well-trained work force that could compete in a globalized world.1 The popular political slogan “It’s the economy, Stupid,” coined by James Carville, campaign strategist for Bill Clinton in the American Presidential election campaign of 1992 to divert the public’s attention from the incumbent George H. W. Bush’s success with the first War in Iraq, gave increased traction to the growing belief among many people in the United States and elsewhere that government’s primary role in all of our lives was economic. Economic prosperity was viewed as foundational to health and happiness, personal financial security and well-being, and even to national security. As a result, and for some time now, the educational emphasis at all levels has been on those subjects thought to be more important to job creation and to the pursuit of wealth. Music and the arts and humanities are generally viewed as less important to that endeavor and therefore of less value in schools and universities. Yet, worldwide, music is a huge industry! In Britain alone, the music, visual, and performing arts industries employed 262,800 persons in 2007 while a further 15,000 were employed in related businesses such as music recording and instrument sales. Total revenues for

It’s the economy, stupid

15

all sectors for 2008 amounted to 1,289 million GBP.2 And these data do not even include the many education jobs that contribute to the economy by providing employment for large numbers of specialist school and studio music teachers, many of whom are also highly trained, practicing musicians. Similarly, in Canada, total operating revenues for the performing arts for 2008 amounted to $1.4 billion (an increase of 5.6 percent from the previous year), of which instrumental music groups and artists accounted for 30 percent. Musical theatre, opera, dance, and other groups shared another 43 percent of total revenue.3 As recently as 2014, the total estimated monetary contribution of the Canadian culture industry to the economy was to $61.7 billion dollars, which was 3.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product!4 Employment rates for Canadian performing artists have fluctuated somewhat throughout the past decade in accordance with economic recessions, but overall the arts professions have managed to hold their own. For example, whereas 1996 saw a 10 percent reduction in employment for performing artists, there was just over a 12 percent increase in rate of employment for them in 2001. On average, employment rates among the cultural sector as a whole between 1996 and 2001 outpaced those “for the overall Canadian economy.”5 Rates of employment for musicians in the United States are also expected to increase by 3 percent between 2014 and 2024,6 all of which suggests that the fortunes of the music industry and job prospects for future professional musicians are not so very different from those of many other industries and occupations. Music can be a difficult career to pursue and often doesn’t pay very well, but overall, and as in other industries and professions, the ranks of employed musicians will continue to expand and shrink in response to economic conditions. Job prospects for classically-trained instrumentalists in North America and elsewhere, however, may be somewhat challenging owing to declining audiences, reductions in public funding, or austerity budgets imposed on some orchestras by their own management, such as happened after the Great Recession of 2008. The 2010–2011 Detroit Symphony strike and the 2011 bankruptcy of the Philadelphia Orchestra suggest that orchestral musicians will for the foreseeable future continue to face significant challenges with respect to employment and working conditions. This, however, is by no means the first time that prominent North American orchestras have encountered serious economic and labor problems. During the late 1960s, many American orchestras, and including the Detroit Symphony, experienced “loud, unavoidable, cymbal-crashing financial trouble.”7 The latter orchestra even went on strike in 1969. Similarly, in Canada, the Toronto Symphony struck in 1999 following almost a decade of financial instability. Yet these and many other orchestras in challenging financial circumstances somehow managed to muddle through and to survive, albeit often through initial reductions in musicians’ salaries and benefits, and occasionally in numbers of musicians. Opera, on the other hand, has managed to reinvent itself in the public eye and ear, with some opera companies having already developed newer and bigger audiences, in part through better utilization of media. The Metropolitan Opera’s

16 It’s the economy, stupid

broadcasts of live operas to packed movie theatres around the world is a particularly inspirational example of the adaptive capabilities of the classical music industry.8 And it goes without saying that popular music continues to be a burgeoning industry providing a wealth of employment opportunities for future musicians and other individuals interested in music related jobs in the broadcasting, recording, and entertainment industries (although less established popular musicians are reportedly experiencing difficulty monetizing their music owing to changes in the internet, copyright laws, and to public attitudes with respect to downloading charges, among other things). In North America, school and university music programs should also for the foreseeable future continue to prepare musicians and music teachers for careers in the music industry and schools, although challenges are to be expected in this sector of the economy as well. The politics of the period immediately following the Great Recession of 2008 were initially somewhat worrisome for music educators in those institutions as governments injected massive amounts of public money into major banks and automobile companies to save capitalism from itself. Thus far the music teaching situation appears to remain relatively stable, although there are concerns about a possible decline in enrolments in American and Canadian universities. Nevertheless, as Albritton (2009) helps to explain, because “capitalism privatizes profits and socializes costs,” music teachers and teacher educators will likely always feel vulnerable during times of fiscal constraint as governments seek to economize or, for ideological reasons, redirect money away from music and arts programs to subjects such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the so-called STEM subjects, that are thought to be more important to the economic success of the nation.9 To date, however, and with the notable exception of former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s England, and possibly in still fiscally challenged continental European countries such as Spain, Greece, and Portugal, the music teaching profession remains relatively insulated from the worst ravages of the latest economic recession. School music programs have experienced significant setbacks in the not too distant past, such as happened in the United States following the enactment of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of 2002 that prompted some school boards and principals to divert money and resources away from music to math, reading, and science in an attempt to improve test scores in those subjects.10 But there have also been significant political victories. NCLB, for example, included the arts as part of the core curriculum, while both the US Senate and House of Representatives later unanimously passed resolutions in support of music education in all schools (in 2005 and 2007).11 American and Canadian school music teachers are perhaps more immediately vulnerable to government financial cutbacks than are their university counterparts (as already suggested, the situation in England and several other European countries appears to be the reverse), but probably no more so than some other subject teachers. Nor have American or Canadian school and university music programs thus far been deliberately targeted by government for elimination, probably in part

It’s the economy, stupid

17

because some portions of the music industry are dependent on them (e.g., musical instrument manufacturers, publishers, etc.). The North American school music market is a source of profit for major corporations that have considerable clout with politicians. Indeed, the aforementioned 2005 Congressional resolution in support of music education actually recognized the leadership role of the National Association of Music Merchants, The International Music Products Association (NAMM) in contributing to the success of the resolution by “emphasizing the importance of school music programs in the academic and social development of children.”12 NAMM acts as a lobbyist to Congress for the music industry and its president participated in the drafting of the above Congressional resolution.13 Among the arguments made by the bill’s sponsors were that music contributed to improved math scores in children and to the development of critical thinking and other skills that are useful in business and the workforce. This was only to be expected since the bill was recommended to the House of Representatives by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Art for art’s sake? Even more recently, the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), no less, published a report summarizing the results of a meta-analysis of “all of the existing [empirical] research” into art education’s potential for equipping “students with the skills required by our global, knowledge-based economies.”14 The OECD is a supranational body charged with promoting “a neoliberal approach to economics and education.”15 Entitled Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education, the report’s authors concluded that “even though … there is some evidence of impact of arts education on different kinds of skills” useful in the workforce, its primary justification is in developing artistic habits of mind involved in “mastery of craft and technique, but also skills such as close observation, envisioning, exploration, persistence, expression, collaboration, and reflection—the skills in thinking and creativity and the social and behavioral skills that are developed in the arts.”16 No evidence, however, was found that music education had “any causal impact on mathematics scores.”17 Nor, perhaps more significantly, could the report’s authors find any empirical research demonstrating an “impact of arts education on critical thinking.”18 As is explained next, this dearth of empirical research on the effects of music education on critical thinking may be attributable firstly to a lack of definitional clarity with respect to the nature of critical thinking among both researchers and educators alike, and secondly, but relatedly, to the aesthetic doctrine of “music for music’s sake” itself which has long been regarded by teachers as the primary rationale for music education in schools.19 In the OECD report, the term critical thinking when applied to art education is associated with the development and application of abstract perceptual and problem-solving skills that are thought to be transferable to other subjects and that are amenable to quantitative measurement, hence the continued obsession among

18 It’s the economy, stupid

OECD countries with international standardized testing of mathematical ability and scientific knowledge in children. Philosopher John Dewey, one of the founders of the modern critical thinking movement, more appropriately described it as a quest for truth and social justice that required that students exercise moral agency and social responsibility by questioning and challenging tradition and sacred myths and narratives as a corrective to practice, much of which was based on privilege, convention, or a foundation of half-truths. The educative process, Dewey emphasized, was “all one with the moral process” and should prepare children to contribute to the creation of a better world.20 The social function of both art and education was “to make the world a different place.”21 German philosopher Theodor Adorno similarly warned in his classic essay “Education after Auschwitz” that the primary purpose of all education ought to be a moral one lest it serve to create highly skilled monsters or fail to prepare the citizenry to resist charismatic leaders and would-be tyrants.22 When lacking the right kind of education in which students were introduced to fundamental political principles and to the controversial moral and political issues of the day—so better informed—they would be ill-prepared to participate intelligently as fully fledged democratic citizens in the politics of the nation. They might instead be rendered complicit in social problems because too credulous with respect to what they are told by government and the powerful or, in the case of teachers, naively convinced of the political neutrality of schools and state-mandated curricula. Schools, as Dewey admonished teachers, are never politically neutral! Perceptual ability was obviously involved in the Deweyan conception of critical thinking as socio-political inquiry and moral agency insomuch as children and adults needed to pay close attention to existing conditions, and including music’s formal or structural properties. For Dewey (1859–1952), and much later Paulo Freire (1921–1997), though, education should foster the development of critical awareness in children of the political or other ideologies and forces in their lives that, if not subjected to critical scrutiny, might render them only passive spectators rather than active participants in the shaping of contemporary politics. Compartmentalization of school subjects frustrated that educational end by making it difficult for children to achieve the requisite synthesis of experience to understand how music and education are shaped by history and all manner of people, politics, and institutions.23 In the case of music, when segregated from other subjects and taught as if in isolation from society and its problems, children and pre-service music teachers were not likely to realize that music and music education were themselves often implicated in social and political problems, such as happened in Hitler’s Germany when music was utilized in schools as a political tool of indoctrination. Music teachers were happy to teach music as Nazi propaganda because of strengthening their subject’s place in the schools.24 Nor, alternatively, are youth as likely to realize music’s potential as a critical tool for political protest and resistance to tyranny and oppression. One immediately thinks, for example, of the Estonian Singing Revolution of 1989 in which tens of thousands of Estonians participated in massed

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singing of long banned national songs the Soviets were powerless to prevent and which contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On the one hand, music can just as easily be used as torture, or as a means of stoking patriotic or religious fervor. On the other hand, it can also function as a form of social criticism or commentary for challenging individuals and groups to rethink their understandings of history and everyday life so they might realize what is thought to be real or true might only be based on habit, illusion, myth, or deliberate fabrication. Indeed, much of this book is given to exposing and critiquing many of the myths, illusions, and deliberate distortions of truth in which music and music teaching and learning may be implicated that, because long taken for granted as objective or absolute truth and thus beyond questioning, have shaped children’s perceptions and understandings of their musical and wider worlds.

Education as a mechanism of social control Since World War Two especially, this latter and deeper understanding of critical thinking has never been countenanced in western schools, and including in music programs, because it has rightly been perceived as a threat to the rich and powerful and to the religious right. Numerous social and educational critics have long complained of an almost complete lack of critical thinking in American (and western) educational institutions to counter state and corporate propaganda!25 This is deliberate, for as Noam Chomsky famously observed in “The Manufacture of Consent,” democratic systems differ from totalitarian ones in that the former are usually constrained in the use of violence and thus seek to minimize threats to the established social order by exercising them “at the source.”26 Politicians and the powerful instead seek to control what people think and do by creating an unstated and presupposed “framework for possible thought” that functions like a state religion in discouraging social or political criticism.27 In the case of the United States, the framework for thinkable thought is capitalism. Various mechanisms of social control have long been evident in media reports about, for example, national health care and military policy and practice but no less so with respect to educational policy and institutions which, as already suggested with regard to the dearth of critical thinking in schools, are assumed to be politically neutral when in reality extensions of the corporate-capitalist state and thus “harnessed to the services of power.”28 A certain amount of social and political criticism might be tolerated within those institutions but only so long as teachers and students constrain themselves from criticizing capitalism itself! Corporate ownership and control of public services such as health care and, indirectly, public education are seldom questioned—rather the opposite: they are seen as expressions of patriotic values—while stronger and more equitable national health care programs and government funding of education and other social programs such as are found in Canada and the Scandinavian countries, and which have long allowed greater social mobility among the poorer classes in those countries compared to the United States, are described as socialist and therefore as un-American.29

20 It’s the economy, stupid

The neoliberal educational agenda This was precisely what happened to Dewey’s conception of critical thinking just before and immediately following World War Two, when democratic capitalists and members of the military-industrial complex wishing to move the country further to the political right boldly declared the death of Dewey’s philosophy because deemed socialist.30 Until only recently, and as cultural and education critic Henry Giroux learned,31 it was personally and professionally risky for academics to seriously critique the capitalist dogma of market deregulation, competition, and globalization that created the conditions for the Great Recession of 2008 that devastated the economies of many countries.32 Catastrophic events such as Hurricane Katrina of 2005 and the Great Recession of 2008 are often described by capitalists as natural disasters the consequences of which, if any blame is assigned at all, are attributed to the actions of a relatively small number of rogue agents or convenient scapegoats. In the case of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, for example, public school teachers were scapegoated by government and business for their students’ historically low standardized test scores and the school system privatized in the names of efficiency and accountability when, owing to poverty and racist policies, those schools had been chronically under-funded for decades.33 The 2008 Recession, on the other hand, was the result of a deliberate corporate policy of what British economist John Maynard Keynes disparaged in the 1920s as ‘casino capitalism.’ Many of Keynes’s criticisms of the culture of high-risk corporate behavior that created the conditions for the Great Depression of 1929 were also relevant to the practices of corporate leaders and the Federal Reserve in the period leading up to the Great Recession of 2008.34 Naomi Klein goes even further in her criticisms of capitalism, accusing neoliberals of capitalizing on their own mistakes through the practice of what she terms “disaster capitalism,” or the deliberate attempt by corporate interests committed to free market principles and policies “to dominate the world … through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”35 The economic chaos and uncertainty of the 2008 Recession allowed neoliberals an unprecedented opportunity to consolidate their hold on public schools internationally through economic and education reform imposed by organizations such as the OECD, the European Union, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, the result of which, as already noted at the outset of this chapter, is that, more than ever before, all education, and including music education, must now be conceived, justified, and assessed in primarily economic terms.36 Hence the OECD’s interest in measuring the economic impact of music and art education in its abovementioned 2013 report Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education.37 The latter report is emblematic of the fundamental problem underlying music education outlined in this chapter in that it is based on an anachronistic and formalistic conception of music that reduces music education to supply-side economics as children are conceived as either future professional musicians or consumers, and not as citizens to be prepared in schools to participate intelligently in the political life

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of society because “aware of what they are doing and what is being done to them.”38 The former understanding of music education as vocational and consumer training is the primary rationale and objective for the study of music and art in school curricula in OECD countries.39 The report reinforces the common misconception of music and the arts generally as existing as objects or skills to be appreciated for their own sakes rather than as complex modes of thought and expression involving a multiplicity of meanings, and going far beyond those available through language alone. The OECD report disregards all but two of those meanings, thereby “narrowing of the range of thought” and consciousness that Orwell warned would likely result in the creation of a deformed citizenry that is incapable of protest or resistance.40

Orwell’s debunking of “art for art’s sake” The OECD report is especially worrisome because claiming objectivity, thereby implying political neutrality, and is thus even more likely to only indoctrinate children to a capitalist agenda for society because taught as if free of ideology. The truth of the matter is that the aesthetic doctrine of “art for art’s sake” arose out of, and was an expression of, aristocratic and later bourgeois sensibilities and interests that were imposed on children in state schools as representing universal values and standards of taste as epitomized, in music’s case, by the western classical tradition. It was hardly representative of most of the world’s music, let alone of most western music! Chomsky regarded this masking of politics and ideology in education as among the primary mechanisms of social control, warning that it constituted a “hidden curriculum” that worked to maintain the political status quo.41 Orwell understood this problem of ideology and political denial in art consumption and criticism, declaring that art’s neutrality was only an illusion. Our “aesthetic judgments are always colored by our prejudices and beliefs”42 and accordingly serve some propagandistic purpose, whether political, social, or religious. Although the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” had long dominated art education, after Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s, it became no longer possible for artists (but apparently not for classically trained musicians and music educators) to ignore art’s ideological and political dimensions. His use of the arts as Nazi propaganda “debunked” the aesthetic rationale of “art for art’s sake”43 For a variety of reasons that are too complicated to explain here, it remained until the sociological and postmodern turns of the 1980s and 1990s before musicians and music education scholars finally began to seriously question the aesthetic doctrine of “music for music’s sake.” Probably most music academics, or at least those in philosophy, sociology, and history, now agree with Orwell and historian Lydia Goehr that music is “inextricably connected to the ordinary and impure conditions of our human affairs” and therefore inevitably ideological and political.44 The authors of the OECD report, however, empiricists all, remain in denial of the ideological and political over- and undertones of the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” and, moreover, seem unaware of their own complicity in the neoliberal

22 It’s the economy, stupid

economic agenda for music and art by contributing to their devaluing in education.45 For having failed to achieve their mandate of obtaining conclusive empirical evidence demonstrating music education’s impact on the development in children of critical thinking (in the weak sense of abstract perceptual and thinking skills) and others skills that are useful to the economy, they reverted to the anachronistic “art for art’s sake” rationale, pleading that music and the other arts should nevertheless continue to be included in the school curriculum for their intrinsic value as a “major domain of experience” fundamentally different from the sciences. The arts, we are told, constitute “an arena without right and wrong answers” in which students are “free … to explore and experiment … and find personal meaning.”46 Given this description of music and art as socially and politically abstract and involving no right or wrong answers—and which also still prevails among many school music teachers—it is no wonder that the report’s authors found no empirical evidence of the impact of music education on the development of critical thinking (in the strong sense) in children. It is “a romantic and sanitized vision” for arts education that perpetuates a dualistic split between the arts and sciences.47 Whereas the STEM subjects are appreciated because they are thought to cultivate “hard-nosed objectivity” in children, music and the other arts are deemed to be entirely subjective—which is a gross exaggeration—and thus, to the neoliberal mind, of only secondary value in education, if worth including at all.48 The report might well provide fodder to economists and politicians who wrongly view music and the other arts as educational frills and therefore expendable even though, as has hopefully has been demonstrated herein and throughout this book, they are important to the economy and to the development of children’s understandings of their world and of their own roles and responsibilities as democratic citizens.

A democratic purpose for music education The 2012 report of The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, commissioned by the US Department of Education, reached a similar conclusion when mandated to document and recommend remedial educational action for the “nation’s anemic civic health.”49 Entitled A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future, the report would appear to challenge the neoliberal economic educational agenda that marginalizes subjects or disciplines long considered basic to democracy. The arts and humanities are clearly among those school and university subjects that are important to the health of democracy by fostering a “knowledgeable, public spirited, and engaged population” that can contribute to the country’s social, intellectual, economic, and cultural well-being.50 Historically, musicians and artists have almost always been at the forefront of political unrest and protest leading to needed change, which is among the reasons why conservatives have traditionally viewed arts teachers as politically suspect unless tamed by the aesthetic “art for art’s sake” doctrine.51 The task force’s report and its various spinoff projects and publications are not without problems. There is an unhealthy obsession with learning outcomes and

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measurement that is now the norm in educational literature but that is likely to contribute to the undermining of a democratic purpose for education by constraining student thought and behavior. The word outcomes implies educational ends are predetermined and thus beyond criticism and interpretation, just as the term measurement is likely to perpetuate the above mentioned dualistic split between the STEM subjects and the arts because implying scientific objectivity. Moreover, although students are expected to demonstrate critical thinking “in relation to issues of public significance” [italics mine]—which might at first glance be seen to imply a Deweyan social democratic conception of education—these and other key terms, and including the concepts of democracy and citizenship themselves, once again lack definition, rendering the report more vulnerable to hijacking by those who would define them in economic terms while disguising “their own participation.”52 The language of democracy is itself more prone to co-option when linked with the grand, but vague, project to mobilize the nation “for success in an increasingly global and diversifying” world.53 In this age of global free trade and the neoliberal “manipulated man,” and unless adequately defined, terms such as critical thinking, public significance, and educational success are likely to be interpreted in economic rather than democratic terms. This lack of specificity of meanings might be attributable to a fear of controversy and conflict as the report’s authors have sought to placate conservatives “championing the cultural heritage of the dominant society” and who conceive of democratic citizenship as social reproduction.54 If so, that would be regrettable not just because narrowing the range of thought and consciousness of students but also because constituting a form of political avoidance that might help perpetuate the naïve belief that education, politics, and government should ideally be free of conflict. The report emphasizes collaboration and sharing over political discord and protest when the two ought to be considered in a democratic state and education system as sometimes uncomfortable bed fellows, existing in creative tension, albeit possibly sharing an interest in creating a more equitable society. In short, there can be little hope of educational progress in fostering democratic citizenship in and through music or other educational subjects in the absence of controversy and debate over sometimes conflicting social values. Nor for much the same reason will discussion of “issues of public significance” necessarily qualify as democratic if the contents of schooling continue to be censured by conservatives hindering “reforms aimed at tying the school curriculum to social ends.”55 The most daunting educational challenges of all, as the authors of A Crucible Moment acknowledge to at least some extent, is how to bridge the chasm between conservatives and liberals by facilitating inquiry while navigating discussion and debate of oft-times difficult topics. The trick is to accomplish these tasks without alienating one’s opponents or, alternatively, cravenly placating them by avoiding controversy and conflict altogether! Nevertheless, and despite these problems, the report is a welcome development because it reminds all concerned that there is more to education than preparation for economic success; that the continuous reinvigoration of the nation depends on the creation of citizens invested as much in the cultural and political life of society

24 It’s the economy, stupid

and its institutions as in its economy. Music and the other arts can contribute in important ways to both democracy and the economy by developing imagination and creativity and by provoking students to think more carefully about deeply about the state of society, and including the economy. As Dewey said, “The first stirrings of dissatisfaction and the first intimations of a better future are always found in works of art.”56 Indeed, Dewey regarded the arts in education as essential to the creation of politically informed and engaged citizens because potentially helping teachers and students “break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness” that would, if left unchallenged, stifle social, economic, and political progress.57 The arts were conceived by him as critical tools, and not just for their content, which was sometimes deliberately controversial, but also for their efficacy and potency in helping to communicate ideas to the public. In democratic politics, he said, “Presentation is fundamentally important” to communication “and presentation is a question of art.”58 To reiterate a point from the conclusion of Chapter 1, how ideas are presented to the public is at least as important as what is presented them if they are to become interested and engaged in discussion and debate beyond a superficial level. Artists could contribute to the shaping of informed public opinion by vivifying and enriching experience resulting in heightened perception and deeper understanding of problems affecting us all. For this reason, and for its prophetic function, Dewey championed artistic freedom as equally important to the democratic project as the “the freeing of social inquiry.”59 Dewey’s philosophy of art education and its politics presents many challenges for music teachers, many of whom still stubbornly cling to the anachronistic aesthetic doctrine of music for music’s sake, which, as already suggested in this and the previous chapter, in this age of homo economicus, leaves them more vulnerable to fiscal restraint and government fiat. For those confirmed in the belief that music really matters to society because it is inevitably political, and because it is an industry unto itself, the challenge is to become involved in those wider professional discussions and debates about democratic citizenship and music’s many contributions therein so that politicians, other educators and scholars, education officials, parents, and their children are better informed of music’s ubiquity and significance in their lives. As the authors of the A Crucible Moment report state, “the times call for visionary leadership that locates education for democracy as a focal point of educational study, reflection, and practice.”60

Notes 1 National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: National Commission, 1983). 2 Gerben Bakker, “The Evolution of the British Entertainment Business: Film, Music, and Videogames,” in Learning from Some of Britain’s Successful Sectors: An Historical Analysis of the Role of Government, Economics Paper no. 6 (London: Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2010), 43. 3 Statistics Canada, Economic Contributions of Culture in Canada, 2004, no. 59824 (Ottawa: Culture, Tourism, and the Centre for Education Statistics Division, 2004), www.statcan. ca/cgi-bin/downpub/studiesfree.cgi

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4 Michael R. Warren, “Culture Shock: Too Few Understand the Economic Impact of Culture, And We Miss Opportunities as a Result,” London Free Press, August 13, 2016, p. E1. 5 Ibid., 16. 6 Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2016–17 Edition, Musicians and Singers (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor), www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainmentand-sports/musicians-and-singers.htm 7 “Music: American Orchestras: The Sound of Trouble,” Time Magazine, June 13, 1969, www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,942093,00.html 8 See www.metoperafamily.org 9 Robert Albritton, Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity (Winnipeg, MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2009), 14. See also in the United Kingdom the 2012 Parliamentary Report of the House of Lords Committee on Higher Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM] Subjects,www.parliament.uk 10 See the website of the National Association for Music Educators (NAfME) in the United states at www.menc.org/resources/view/music-education-in-the-law 11 National Association of Music Merchants, “US Congress Voices Unanimous Support for Boosting Music Education in Schools: Congressional Resolution Also Lauds NAMM’s Efforts,” (Washington, DC: 2005), www.namm.org/news/press-releases/us-congressvoices-unanimous-support-boosting-musi 12 Ibid. 13 See www.namm.org/board-members/joe-lamond 14 Ellen Winner, Thalia Goldstein, and Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation: OECD Publishing, 2013), 3. As stated on its website, among the OECD’s core values is to be “objective: Our analyses and recommendations are independent and evidence-based,” www.oecd.org/about/ 15 Stephanie Horsley, “Facing the Music: Pursuing Social Justice Through Music Education in a Neoliberal World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, edited by Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schmidt, Gary Spruce, and Paul Woodford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 65. 16 Winner et al., Art for Art’s Sake, 20. 17 Ibid., 18. 18 Ibid., 19. 19 Charles Leonhard and Robert W. House, Foundations and Principles of Music Education, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1958/1972). 20 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Mentor Books, 1950), 145. 21 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 363. 22 Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Never Again! The Holocaust’s Challenge for Educators, edited by Helmut Schreier and Matthias Heyl (Hamburg: Kramer, 1997). 23 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems. 24 Alexandra Kertz-Welzel, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin: Adorno on Music Education,” Research Studies in Music Education, 25, no. 1 (2005): 1–12. 25 See, for example, West’s Democracy Matters and Howard Zinn and Donald Macedo, Howard Zinn on Democratic Education (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 26 Noam Chomsky, “The Manufacture of Consent,” in The Chomsky Reader, edited by James Peck (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1987), 132. 27 Ibid. 28 Philip H. Phenix, “National Necessity and Educational Policy, Reconsidered,” Phi Delta Kappan 40, no. 7 (1959): 269–271. Phenix expressed incredulity at the claim made by a contemporary academic that a doctrine of national necessity exerted a controlling interest over higher education. The argument to which he was responding was that the 1958 National Defense Education Act and other federal education initiatives dictated that higher education contribute to the social, economic, and political strength of the nation. In hindsight, Phenix’s rebuttal was stunningly naive because he refused to believe that

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29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

40 41

42 43

education was “harnessed to the services of power” or that education was “the obedient tool of social forces largely beyond its control or consent.” Nor did he believe that nationalism was “a powerful factor in American life today” (270). Nathan D. Graves, “Intergenerational Mobility for Whom? The Experience of Highand Low-Earning Sons in International Perspective,” in Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe, edited by Miles Corak (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58–59. Jerome A. Bruner, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (New York: Atheneum, 1962/ 1970). After receiving many death threats for daring to criticize American economic, cultural, and education policy, Giroux resigned from Pennsylvania State University and moved to Canada, where, as of 2018, he continued to serve as McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest (www.mcmaster.ca) in Hamilton, Ontario. Joseph R. Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and The Sinking of the World Economy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Stiglitz, Freefall. This is a quote from Klein’s website, see www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine Gabriel Rusinek and José Luis Aróstegui, “Educational Policy Reforms and the Politics of Music Teacher Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, eds. Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schmidt, Gary Spruce, and Paul Woodford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 78–90. Rusinek and Aróstegui argue that, given the continued dominance of neoliberal education reform internationally, if music teachers are to secure a place for their programs for the future, they will need to demonstrate their relevance and efficacy in preparing children for future economic success. This will entail increased reliance on qualitative evidence-based assessment tools for purposes of accountability. The word ‘impact’ in the title was likely chosen by OECD personnel, rather than the music researchers involved, and is a reflection of the political rhetoric of economic accountability to which universities are increasingly subjected. The research conducted in today’s public universities is assessed by their governments according to its economic impact. Even individual faculty members are subject to quantitative assessment of their publications with respect to numbers of professional citations as indication of the “impact” on their fields. See Paul Smeyers and Nicholas.C. Burbules, “How to Improve Your Impact Factor: Questioning the Quantification of Academic Quality,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45, no. 1 (2011): 1–17. John Dewey, “Education and Social Change,” from The Social Frontier (1937), in Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy, edited byJoseph Ratner (New York: The Modern Library, 1939), 696. The authors of the OECD Art for Art’s Sake report refer to personal musical fulfilment and not consumer training per se, but in the absence of any recognition of the importance of encouraging children to think critically about the music they consume music education is more accurately described as only consumer training (19). The OECD report’s authors are by no means the first or only proponents of a vision of music education based on the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” who would reduce music in schools to vocational and consumer training. See Laura Zakaras and Julia F. Lowell, Cultivating Demand for the Arts: Arts Learning, Arts Engagement, and State Arts Policy (Santa Monica: CA: The Rand Corporation, 2008). Keith Gessen, “Introduction,” to Orwell’s All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, xix. As Chomsky observes in “The Manufacture of Consent,” this evasion of politics and social responsibility and accountability is “the systemic expression of the way our institutions function and will continue to function unless impeded by an aroused public that comes to understand their nature and their true history” (126). Orwell, “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,” 3. Ibid.

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44 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 286. 45 Orwell noticed that, whereas artists are often “menaced” by totalitarians for their political messaging, “it is often easier for the scientists than for the writers [or artists and musicians] to line up behind their respective governments.” Orwell, All Art is Propaganda, 260. 46 Winner et al., Art for Art’s Sake, 20. 47 Chris Philpott, “The Justification for Music in the Curriculum: Music Can Be Bad for You,” in Debates in Music Teaching, edited by Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce (London: Routledge, 2012), 49. 48 Ibid., 48. 49 The US Department of Education awarded a contract to Global Perspectives Institute, Inc. (GPI) with a subcontract to the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to initiate a national dialogue resulting in recommendations for “strengthening students’ civic learning and democratic engagement as a core component of college study.” See National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2012), vii. Although commissioned by the federal Department of Education, the report bears the disclaimer that it “does not necessarily reflect the views and policies” of the department and government (1). The expression “the nation’s anemic civic health” appears on a one-page flyer on the AAC&U website advertising the task force’s report. See www.aacu.org/crucible 50 Ibid. A Crucible Moment is primarily concerned with university education, but the authors state that the foundation of a democratic and civil society is built in the K–12 “education sector” (2). I dislike the word sector here because usually associated with economics and business. 51 Joel Westheimer, “What Did You Learn in School Today? Music Education, Democracy, and Social Justice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, edited by Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schmidt, Gary Spruce, and Paul Woodford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 107–115. 52 Richard White, “Money Always Talks in American Political Circles,” London Free Press, March 1, 2014, p. E6. The same admonishment applies to the report’s recommendation that all students require knowledge of American history, that historical research, writing, and teaching are never free of, or immune to, political interest and influence. Given Chomsky’s complaint about the public education system being an extension of the corporate-capitalist system, schools and universities are not likely, unless pressed by an informed and engaged public that would hold those institutions to a democratic standard, to present students with a more accurate and balanced account of their country’s past, including its many sordid chapters. See Paul Woodford, “Confronting Innocence: Democracy, Music Education, and the Neoliberal ‘Manipulated Man’,” in Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice, edited by Lisa C. DeLorenzo (New York: Routledge, 2016), 51–64. 53 Ashley Finley, “A Brief Review of the Evidence on Civic Learning in Higher Education” (paper prepared for distribution at the A Crucible Moment conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Washington, DC, January 2012), 3. 54 Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “The Challenges Facing Civic Education in the 21st Century,” Daedalus, The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 142, no. 2 (2013): 70. 55 Joel Westheimer, “What Did You Learn in School Today?” 109–110. 56 Dewey, Art As Experience, 345–346. 57 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, A Crucible Moment, 6.

3 WHOSE DEMOCRACY, AND WHAT KIND OF CITIZEN?

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then? George Orwell, 1984

The previous chapter concluded with a response to the 2012 report of The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement commissioned by the US Department of Education the authors of which were concerned about the anemic civic health of the nation. I proposed that the arts and humanities were among those school and university subjects that could contribute in important ways to the country’s civic well-being by fostering an informed and engaged citizenry. The report’s authors concluded with a call for visionary leadership that “locates education for democracy as a focal point of educational study, reflection, and practice.”1

Toward a just society It is time that music educators rose to that challenge. Some progress has already been made in that direction. Democratic citizenship was a central theme of my aforementioned 2005 book Democracy and Music Education in which music educators were urged to begin “reclaiming a democratic purpose for music education by contributing to wider intellectual and political conversations about the nature and significance of music in our lives and those of our children.”2 My thesis was that music teachers should reconceive of their professional role as public intellectuals and critically informed and engaged citizens as much as teachers of this or that music (the two should be inseparable). A democratic music education implied far more than just individual freedom or nondiscrimination. Perhaps more than anything else, it required the development and exercise of moral character as

Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen? 29

epitomized by the Socratic and Aristotelian virtues of persistent social critique coupled with “friendship, love, neighborliness … honesty … and a willingness to compromise for the sake of some greater good,” all of which are essential to the pursuit of truth through intellectual conversations about the state of society and “the forging of relationships leading to a sense of community.”3 This present book is a continuation on that theme of attempting to reach a broader audience in defense of the value of music and the arts in education in contributing to the fostering of democratic citizens. Randall Allsup similarly calls for the creation of “competent democratic citizens,” although I dislike the descriptor “competent” because suggesting some form of assessment and judgment.4 In any event, the model of democracy to which he subscribes is not explicitly identified, and so it is not clear how teachers might judge their own competence, let alone that of their students, as democratic citizens. This lack of explicit definition of democracy is common among music education scholars and something for which I have admonished them for contributing to confusion of educational means and ends.5 It strikes me as somewhat disingenuous of teachers and academics to claim a democratic purpose for their programs without acknowledging that democracy is an open and hotly contested concept—at least among philosophers and political scientists—warranting considerable discussion and debate both within and outside of educational institutions. This evasion of definition was something that Orwell warned of in his essay “Politics and the English Language” as often deliberate. “Defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if tied to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way” to mask social and political agendas.6 Moreover, “when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”7 Allsup’s own educational agenda is in no way malicious, rather the opposite. Nor do I think there is much of a gap between his real and declared aims, but his lack of specificity and definition of this key term may be a symptom of the music teaching profession’s wariness of publicly going against the grain of American democratic capitalism. Scott Goble describes democratic capitalism as the country’s common social and political system that allots “constituent communities … a voice in its governance” but in which the public sphere is regarded as “a theoretically neutral social context from which discussion of religion and other subjective matters of the psyche [including music] would be generally suspended due to the populace’s lack of a common ‘subjective vocabulary.’”8 This system and ideology have long had the effects of discouraging public discussion and debate about religion and other difficult topics such as military policy while also fostering the misperception among the masses of music’s social and political insignificance. In the minds of much of the populace, and owing to the country’s emphases on economics and “scientific and technical progress,” the long avoidance of the politics of music in educational institutions, music teachers’ reliance on major corporations for their music and supplies, and the pervasiveness of music in the ubiquitous media and entertainment

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industries, music is increasingly viewed as “an ostensibly generic product of entertainment.”9 Within the American democratic capitalist scheme of things, school or university teachers who would introduce students to new and more open-ended musical practices and ways of thinking that challenge traditional values and the myth of the political neutrality of schools are likely to be perceived by some conservatives as unpatriotic and guilty of propagandizing and indoctrinating students to socialist values and thus warranting public exposure and control through educational marginalization.10 Nevertheless, as the late philosopher Ronald Dworkin helped explain, “we cheat our students if we fail to prepare them to live as democratic citizens.”11 Teachers have a professional and ethical responsibility to introduce students to fundamental political principles and the workings of their democratically elected governments. If the latter are to have much hope of developing personal political agency, however, they should also learn that different conceptions of democracy exist each of which will in its own way shape their understandings of their country and how “they should act as citizens in a democracy.”12 In the end, and if not kept in the dark by family, religion, educational institutions, peers, or a tyranny of a majority, they are theoretically free to choose in which ones to invest as guides to their own moral and political practice throughout the lifespan. Pre-service teachers, too, should learn in teachers college that it matters in which definition or conception of democracy they have already invested, or would choose to invest, because providing a necessary intellectual foundation for corresponding normative notions of citizenship. When applied as guides to curricular and pedagogical action, each conception and model of democracy and democratic citizenship is likely to result in different educational and political outcomes.

Three models of democratic citizenship Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne, in “What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy,” identify three prominent and sometimes overlapping models of democratic citizenship that can help provide definitional clarity for teachers while also placing their claims of a democratic purpose for music or art education into broader political perspective. The first is the personally responsible citizen. School programs adopting this platonic model of citizenship hope “to build character and personal responsibility by emphasizing honesty, integrity, self-discipline, and hard work.”13 It is generally (albeit wrongly) regarded as apolitical because individualistic and unconcerned about the causes of social injustice. The emphasis is on subject matter and “commitments to core democratic values—such as freedom of speech or liberty in general.”14 In no way does it challenge the status quo, rather the opposite. It props up the existing power structures of democratic capitalist society. The following two models of citizenship are responses to this more traditional, “narrow, and ideologically conservative conception of citizenship embedded in many current efforts at teaching for democracy” that, as just suggested, can frustrate the “tying of the school curriculum to social ends.”15

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Westheimer’s and Kahne’s second curricular model of democratic citizenship is the participatory citizen. In this model, students are described as actively engaged in civic affairs at all political levels in learning the workings of government and the importance of organization, cooperation, and compromise in, for example, collectively attempting to craft or guide school policy, or caring for the needy in their communities. “While the personally responsible citizen would contribute cans of food for the homeless,” they write, “the participatory citizen might organize the food drive.”16 This model is said to be Deweyan in nature. Westheimer and Kahne, however, are being overly reductive in equating Dewey’s educational philosophy with “participation in collective endeavors” and the adjudication of competing interests. As I have written elsewhere, Dewey was far more radical in his educational thinking than many teachers and academics suppose, and particularly with respect to art education. His biographer Robert Westbrook described his classic 1934 book Art As Experience as a radical call for educational and political empowerment of the masses through art, beginning with their own experience rather than with the so-called “serious” music and art of experts and social elites.17 The book is one of Dewey’s “most powerful statements” of his politics, which were fundamentally concerned with “rectifying the adverse effects of an inegalitarian distribution of social power.”18 Elsewhere, he complained that social democracy was impossible so long as big business casts a shadow over American politics and society.19 The third model of democratic citizenship presented is labelled the justiceoriented citizen and is for reasons explained below and elsewhere in this book far less commonly found in schools. This type of citizen shares with participatory citizens an “emphasis on collective work related to the life and issues of the community” but differs from them in wishing to engage in structural critique of society, its problems, and their historical roots with a view to effecting needed change through the redistribution of power. This, as already described in some detail in previous chapters, was Dewey’s purpose and modus operandi, and it colors much of my own philosophical thinking, writing, and teaching. More is said toward the end of the next chapter of Dewey’s ideas about the nature and educational value of structural and historical social critique. Those who have read my previous book will recall that citizenship is defined therein in social democratic terms of freedom, inclusivity, and social responsibility. Although obviously influenced by Dewey, it is nevertheless a distinctly Canadian view of citizenship and music education in which the emphases are on social equality and equity over personal freedom.20 Canadians and many Europeans view health-care as a fundamental human right and are willing to pay higher taxes to fund social welfare systems, including public education and national health care, that may limit somewhat their freedom to choose. Those public systems are expressions of the citizenry’s commitment to social equality and justice. Although more right-wing conservatives (see former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the following chapter) might regard Canada’s Keynesian welfare state with its social safety systems and stronger regulation of banks an abomination

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because limiting corporate freedom, a majority of Canadians consider them as foundational to what Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the late 1960s and early 1970s called “The Just Society.”21

Freedom above all? Americans, by contrast, and owing to historical events going as far back as the Declaration of Independence and constant reiteration and glorification of liberty in the media and political discourse in the United States, tend to privilege freedom above all else.22 Dewey, were he alive today, would attribute the primacy of freedom among the American polity in part to the fact that “meanings run in channels formed by instrumentalities” such as language and the arts that may through a long process of indoctrination of the public become habitual and regarded as natural and thus true and beyond criticism.23 This might explain somewhat why Allsup places a premium on personal independence and freedom as educational ends. “Independence is related to freedom. It is the [italics mine] end of education. Independence of mind, therefore, is a moral aim. It is made manifest in choices.”24 This is an instance of the just mentioned confusion of educational means with ends likely attributable to lack of definition and confirmation bias and resulting in philosophical contradiction, for Allsup is a Dewey scholar and deeply committed to the pursuit of social justice.25 Dewey regarded freedom as only a means to that end. “The democratic idea of freedom [was] not the right of each individual to do as he pleases” but, as already explained above and in previous chapters, to contribute to the common weal.26 Whatever critical and humane functions music and the other arts might have could only be understood and exercised intelligently within the wider context of “collective civilization.”27 Readers less familiar with Allsup’s work should thus be forgiven if thinking (wrongly) at first that his philosophy, as found in his 2016 book Remixing Music Education: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, presents a laissez-faire conception of democracy based on a negative and individualistic view of freedom as “the absence of restriction and coercion.”28 Like my own, his is intended as a positive conception of freedom and a counter narrative to the prevailing capitalistic educational discourse that for too long has constrained students’ intelligence and personal agency by conceiving educational ends and meanings as predetermined and resulting in stultification. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, and while no means abandoning traditional music programs altogether, he calls for an open conception of music education as involving the creation, exploration, and celebration of alternative meanings and ways of thinking musically and acting in the world that are “wondrous and strange” and that challenge the heteronomic values inherent in those programs.29 This would require the creation of democratic spaces “of difference and equity, not mere equality”30 where people can come together to form non-hierarchical relationships in search of “some kind of new meaning.”31 Like Christopher Small in his 1998 book Musicking, Allsup wishes to attend to the [social] “relationships that bring meaning to our understanding of music,” but he

Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen? 33

finds Small’s “vision … insufficiently venturesome, leaving critics struggling to articulate an open and inclusive concept of music education in which a multitude of values and perspectives intersect.”32 Much as I admire Allsup and respect his work, I am not convinced that he is correct or fair in this assessment of Small as insufficiently venturesome. His 1977 book Music, Society, Education was described at the time of publication as “remarkable and revolutionary,” while Musicking was justifiably lauded in a critical review by me in 2002 as a “sociological tour de force.”33 He had a profound impact on music education in his own day with his insistence that music and music education were inevitably social and thus also political. A more accurate assessment of Small’s oeuvre is that he presented penetrating and highly informed critical analyses of the history of the western classical music heritage to reveal some of the social forces that shaped it and the public’s understandings of its musical traditions and conventions as immutable truths. As is explained toward the conclusion of the next chapter, Dewey would have approved of Small’s use of history as a set of critical tools for excavating the roots of present problems and for provoking needed debate in pursuit of social change. Where Small went wrong in his vision was in going to the opposite extreme in concluding that virtually “anything goes” and that one should ignore the past because authoritarian and oppressive. Musical activities should not be “mediated through the judgment of generations”; performers, teachers, children, and youth were all ultimately free to participate as they wished.34 All that mattered was that they enjoyed themselves. Ironically, given Small’s own critical acumen, knowledge, and love of that musical tradition, the final pages of Musicking present an anarchic and hedonistic vision of music and music education as operating in a social, historical, and political vacuum. Nothing is said directly in those pages of the necessity of children and youth, themselves, learning about the historicity of music and music teaching and learning or of their educational and political potentialities for revealing important truths so better prepared to exercise their rights and responsibilities as democratic citizens. His conclusion that musickers should simply enjoy themselves contradicted his argument at the outset of that same book to the effect that the proper end of education ought to be awareness of the nature and qualities of the human relationships involved in musicking. As I summarized his thesis in a recent publication, “composing, performing, conducting, teaching, learning, listening, or critiquing music are all ultimately political acts: They are all expressions of, or metaphorically represent, human interests and relationships and are therefore rife with issues of power and control.”35 Allsup shares more in common with Small that he perhaps realizes, for while recognizing the importance of historical knowledge for understanding present conditions and that public performance and high levels of musical expertise are over-emphasized in music education, he, too, is a social critic with an impressive grasp of contemporary educational politics, philosophy, and history. And yet, like Small, he has far more to say about music-making among children and youth in the present than about its reception or critical and historical analyses by them of the musical and

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broader societies in which music education is located. As described in a “framework intended as a structuring device for the design of the open music classroom,” students engage in inquiry and dialogue about personally relevant problems and begin to explore, experiment, rehearse, perform, and thereby share what they have learned.36 It is not sufficiently clear whether their inquiry and dialogue will, or even should, be directed towards their peers or involve critical examination of their own pre-existing practices, assumptions, beliefs, and prejudices, let alone of cherished national or other myths. Nor is it likely, given the constraints of time, lack of adequate resources in schools, and the many obstructions to critical thought therein (e.g., standardized curricula and testing, emphasis on vocational training and outcome-based educational practices, the authoritarian “structure of the current typical high school,” and a general fear of controversy in today’s educational institutions) are their inquiry into and dialogue about complex problems likely to rise above the superficial without significant moral guidance and direction from their teachers.37 Even then, as British educator Henry Maitles writes in “What Type of Citizenship Education,” the creation of democratic classrooms would require exceptional teachers possessing the “courage, skill, and confidence to develop active learning and genuine participation.”38 Many of these and other problems and challenges facing all teachers, and including university teachers, are explored in Chapter 5. Allsup’s antidote to the narrowness of the above mentioned capitalist educational discourse is that the traditional model of music education based on the western classical canon should eventually be replaced with a potentially more democratic model of performance and composition as texts involving a “layering of meanings which always lets the previous meanings continue, as a geological formation, saying the opposite without giving up the contrary.”39 His own preference and hope for the future of music education is that teachers emphasize improvisation and composition over traditional “purely allographic models of performing” such as are found in the typical concert band, orchestra, or choir because more likely to “cultivate teacher and student autonomy.”40 As already suggested, though, one gets the sense that the just mentioned critical and historical analyses that are essential for decoding and understanding music’s polysemy of meanings are intended more for academics or teachers than they are for children and youth. Martha Nussbaum, for example, is quoted as warning that the stifling of dissent in educational institutions globally will eventually result in schools and universities “producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.”41 The remark is made to teachers and academics, although one hopes that children and youth would also learn about the politics and economics shaping education, and including in music and art education in both the past and present, so students could better appreciate the continuity of human experience and their own vulnerability to the social and political forces acting upon them. Finally, and once again like Small and the authors of the previously mentioned OECD Art for Art’s Sake report (see Chapter 2), in which music was described as

Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen? 35

having no right or wrong answers, Allsup concludes that children and youth should be free in “open classrooms” to do more or less as they choose, albeit this time through musical improvisation and composition rather than through endless reinterpretation of the classics or core repertories. Improvisation is described as inherently critical because it requires a “fundamental openness” that calls into question rule-bounded norms and conventions, thereby also potentially fostering the development of personal autonomy and the abovementioned non-hierarchical relationships.42 No one doubts that improvisation has some educational potential for freeing inquiry from overly repressive strictures and thereby perhaps facilitating the growth of personal confidence and other qualities needed to exercise one’s personal agency. It is a stretch, though, to suggest that it can contribute to democratic citizenship in the almost mystical sense that it can “call into being non-hierarchical relationships.” As already suggested, much depends on the teacher’s moral and professional guidance, and sometimes direction, in ensuring that healthy and humane relationships among students are fostered and maintained lest improvisation exercises or activities degenerate into a laissez-faire “anything goes” or the musical equivalent of novelist William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.43 This flattening of power dynamics and relations in the classroom was another prominent theme in my Democracy and Music Education―that teachers or academics calling for democratic classes would be remiss in their duties and moral responsibilities to children, their parents, and democratic society if they instituted educational practices that levelled teacher-student and student-student relationships entirely because leaving a void of power that would likely be filled by lessaltruistically or humanely motivated individuals or groups. This was the moral of Orwell’s famous novel Animal Farm (after which an experimental school in my own childhood hometown in the early 1970s was renamed by friends)―that the pursuit of unconstrained freedom can result in tyranny as the talented or otherwise privileged outpace their peers or the ethically challenged and more domineering or confident among them assume control through intimidation or the exercise of personal charisma. Indeed, the notion of non-hierarchical relationships, if such utopian relationships can be said to exist at all, can ironically be interpreted as implying the stifling of the human striving and agency that is usually associated with totalitarian regimes! The point I am trying to make here is that, if, as is now commonly acknowledged among music academics, classical music does not civilize by virtue of its structural properties alone then neither should we assume the same of the emergent forms arising out of free improvisation. To extend educator Louis Menand’s argument, when teaching for democratic citizenship, it is less what we teach that matters as it is why and how we teach, meaning that teachers must model in their classes the democratic values and behaviors they wish to instill in students. No matter the educational activity, and, if manipulation or confusion of means with ends are to be avoided, it must be imbued with expressly democratic purpose, and beyond mere freedom to choose.44

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This discussion of how improvisation and other musical activities in educational institutions might contribute to personal and social transformation raises important ethical issues for teachers, since, as in so many other aspects of our lives, political persuasion is implied. Several of those ethical considerations and dilemmas for teachers are raised below in relation to music education philosopher David Elliott’s recent work and in Chapter 8, where the importance of, and challenges associated with, helping students to develop musical and artistic voices of their own is explored in more detail. For now, it will suffice to note that the proposal that musical and educational activities should be imbued with political purpose is hardly a new or radical idea. Recall from Chapter 2 Chomsky”s own observation that our educational institutions are based on a “hidden curriculum” favoring the social, economic, and political status quo.45 Spanish music educators Gabriel Rusinek and José Luis Aróstegui explain that education is an “intrinsically political matter” in which “the daily dilemma [of teachers] is whether to contribute to the maintenance of the social status quo or to confront it, and either option will occur, even if teachers are not conscious of the implications of their decisions.”46 When lacking an explicit, and hopefully democratic, purpose beyond freedom to choose, improvisational or other activities are not likely to challenge the status quo. Even then, and owing to its impermanence and instability of messaging, and unless overseen by bold and politically savvy teachers, free improvisation is not likely to contribute much to the education of democratic citizens except very indirectly and modestly.47 Having said that, there is a need and a place for both direct and indirect criticism in and through music and art education according to individuals’ needs, interests, and risk-tolerance levels. Dewey’s own stated preference for how music and the other arts might best perform their critical function was that it should be done indirectly through disclosure, involving juxtaposition and contrast of current conditions with imagined possibilities, “not to set judgment,” but to predict possible futures. As he continued, “a set of possibilities that are unrealized and that might be realized are when they are put in contrast with actual conditions, the most penetrating ‘criticism’ of the latter that can be made.”48 As already suggested in this chapter, the arts can express meanings obliquely and with greater subtlety and power than is possible through everyday language or numbers alone. To quote the final sentence of Dewey’s Art As Experience: “Art is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and precept, admonition, and administration.”49 And yet, Dewey was elsewhere remarkably frank in expressing his own criticisms of capitalism and government very boldly and directly in certain of his many publications, albeit less so in his educational writings. There is a dualistic split in Dewey’s philosophy between philosophers who were charged with commenting directly on society and its problems compared to artists and musicians whose criticisms were to be expressed indirectly.50 Some of the philosophical roots of this dualism are introduced and critiqued toward the end of the final chapter of this book. Suffice it to say for now that Dewey’s and Allsup’s notions of indirect social

Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen? 37

criticism via music and the arts might help to assuage the abovementioned problem of how to prime and navigate discussions and debates about difficult topics or problems—because perceived as less personal and confrontational by its recipients and thus having potential to set the desired tone for conversation—so they remain productive and helpful in building what Dewey called the Great Community.51 Indirectness, though, is a relative term and I suspect Dewey would have regarded free improvisation as insufficiently critical, if esoteric and disconnected from social realities, and thus lacking prophetic function. It might well afford small groups of individuals some limited opportunity to exercise their freedom in forming less hierarchical relationships in the moment, but—at risk of being overly redundant—it is difficult to imagine how it might be very effective or enduring in its contribution to the fostering of democratic citizenship among children and youth unless involving expressly political purpose and content. Moreover, as also explained in Chapter 8, Dewey’s own conception of music and art as indirect criticism involving the juxtaposition of the present with the possible, although in my view a far more useful and potentially potent political strategy than improvisation alone, is not without problems. Of Allsup’s two preferred modes of instruction and learning—improvisation and composition—the latter has, in my view, far greater potential for contributing either indirectly or directly to the fostering of democratic citizenship among children and youth by figuratively, and sometimes literally, giving them a voice to practice expressing their own ideas and criticisms of society in ways that fellow students, the public, and politicians can better understand. Of course, one could say the same thing about the performance of pre-existing compositions, works of visual art, and productions of drama and ballet, including canonical works, that were originally intended as social criticism and whose meanings remain relevant, or that can be reclaimed from those who have misappropriated them and then reconstructed and reapplied to perennial problems. There remains an important place in music and art education for performance of the classics and other pre-existing art forms and their respective meanings. It would be a great loss to humanity and education if those works and performances thereof were replaced entirely by new ones that confused “the location of composer [artist], improviser, performer, Author, Conductor [sic], and audience” because likely to result in historical revisionism and the loss of political and cultural memory.52 When lacking that knowledge, Dewey cautioned, and including the historical roots of problems in which music was originally or later involved, individuals cannot understand or contribute as intelligently as they might to wider public discussions and debates over their country’s values and its place in the world, let alone realize music’s potential for moral and political agency.53 There is, after all, a wealth of pre-existing classical, popular, and folk music (and literature and art) composed by individuals with a democratic interest whose music was intentionally linked with the pursuit of human freedom and dignity and whose original meanings are worth reclaiming. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, was misappropriated during World War Two not only by the Nazis but also by the

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Soviets, Americans, and British, all of whom propagandized it to promote their own cultural and national conceptions of political identity and virtue.54 From a pedagogical point of view, the provenance of this symphony presents a fascinating and illuminating illustration of humanity’s capacity for clothing and repurposing music with meanings. Several examples of musical misappropriation or co-option of popular music by politicians are also provided in the next chapter for purposes of illustrating the malleability of music’s meanings and to emphasize the importance in education of children and youth learning how to better attend to and decode the music in their everyday lives, beginning with its provenance.

Protect the minority of the opulent against the majority David Elliott is more explicit than is Allsup in enjoining teachers to encourage youth to exercise their democratic right as citizens to apply “their musical abilities, and the emotional powers of music, to resist or subvert the harmful conventions and politics of their locations, or create various forms and degrees of musical-civil disobedience and ‘musical-ethical spectacles.’”55 Teachers should “help students conceive and practice ‘music-making as ethical action’ for social justice” so they can contribute to “the health of their social communities.”56 Once again, democracy is not defined, although his reference to social justice implies a social democratic purpose for music and art education to which American conservatives and members of the Alt-Right might object.57 The noun “democracy” and the adjective “democratic” are sprinkled liberally throughout the second edition of his 2015 book Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, co-authored with Marissa Silverman. Mention is made, for example, of “democratic classrooms,” “democratic educators,” students “democratically choosing repertoire,” citizens needing to be “educated democratically,” “teaching democratically,” and students “participating in democratic dialogues,” but because his concept of democracy is never explicitly identified and defined readers never learn what is meant by democratic citizenship or the idea and ethics of students “democratically choosing repertoire.”58 Several examples of socially and politically engaged musicians and teachers are provided as exemplars for inspiration and perhaps emulation. Citizenship is loosely described as a complex and multidimensional concept that includes “personal, social, cultural, historical, embodied, ethical, and emotional dynamics and commitments that ebb and flow as a person’s and a nation’s circumstances change.”59 This description could apply to virtually any conception of citizenship, including totalitarian ones. More significantly for present purposes, the American psyche and notions of citizenship are described as “infused with images, symbols, metaphors, longings, memories, myths, heroes and heroines, anthems, marches, slogans, and stock characters, for example, the warrior, the hardworking immigrant, the dangerous alien, and the nomad.”60 But while Elliott acknowledges the social and historical contingency of music and the other arts, no mention is made of the necessity in education of teachers and their pupils questioning and problematizing specific patriotic myths, orthodoxies, and cherished beliefs, so making them less prone to swallowing

Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen? 39

“what is persistently told them, or told with an air of authority.”61 Nor does Elliott have much to say therein about how the political and professional ideologies and discourses surrounding or embedded in educational institutions and pedagogical practices might sometimes be based on a pedagogy of lies and thus warrant critical scrutiny in school and university, and particularly in teacher education programs.62 Ross Rubenstein reminds us that education systems and policy “reflect the agendas and world views of federal, state, and local politicians, government officials, powerful foundations, and other well-funded interest groups—including teachers’ unions.”63 One should, of course, add corporations! Without that information, it is difficult for readers to imagine how students might be sufficiently well-informed and disposed to engage in the requisite critical and ethical self-reflection and evaluation of structural societal problems necessary to ensure their political causes are actually just ones, let alone whether they are “acting rightly.”64 Like many other music educators, Elliott prefers to play it safe, shying away from really “difficult” or contentious topics by remaining at a level of theoretical abstraction and inspiring vignettes that are bound not to offend the conservative sensibilities of students, their parents, editorial boards of mainstream professional publications, or music and art teachers who might regard his own ideas as unpatriotic or un-American.65 It is ultimately up to students, themselves, to decide the validity of their beliefs and assumptions according to their own interests, capabilities, and understandings and without direct assistance from their instructors lest it threaten the perceived neutrality of educational institutions.66 In consequence, and owing to his avoidance of structural critique of society and its problems, Elliott’s and Silverman’s implicit model of a democratic music education has more in common with Westheimer’s and Kahne’s interpretation of the participatory citizen rather than with the justice-oriented one, and notwithstanding their rhetoric about music-making as a form of ethical action dedicated to the pursuit of social justice. Later, in the second edition of Music Matters, mention is made of the importance of student self-reflection and awareness of some of the challenges of neoliberal education reform for teachers and schools. The latter, though, appear mostly in the last few pages of the book as almost afterthoughts. Here, finally, readers find mention of the American Dream as “the belief in unlimited opportunities for those who ‘get an education’ and work hard.”67 True to form, and rather than frankly acknowledging it is a longstanding myth from the time of the writing of the American Constitution that, in James Madison’s words, has worked to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” Elliott and Silverman simply conclude that there has been little change in American educational priorities in the past century.68 Dewey, by contrast, was more forthright in his political and educational commentary, arguing that since the beginning of the republic the wealthy have kept the public in the dark and treated them as second or third class citizens whose judgments could only be trusted when heavily indoctrinated.69 The aim of education, as he and much later also Orwell and Chomsky conceived it, was to prepare citizens who could counter the propaganda apparatus of the state and its plutocracy of the wealthy.

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As just suggested, Elliott is by no means alone among mainstream music education academics in eschewing pointed personal critique of contemporary politics affecting music and arts education. The 2016 book Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility and Ethical Praxis, edited by Elliott, Silverman, and Bowman, is much like many other academic texts in being heavy on theory but somewhat removed from the nitty gritty of contemporary politics and economics.70 To the editors’ great credit, they have assembled a roster of authors from a variety of related fields, including music education, music history, ethnomusicology, and art, thereby helping to widen professional discourse about the nature of artistic citizenship, but it is not a work of criticism per se except again indirectly. The editorial emphasis is on theory and explanatory power, and less so on personal and professional criticism or on the professional and ethical responsibilities of academics themselves practicing and thereby also modelling to students what they preach. Thankfully, there are several notable exceptions to this rule. Geoffrey Baker’s chapter, for example, provides a blistering critique of the Venezuelan El Sistema orchestra program and its politics, including the oft-cited response to critics by its leaders that they are not “producing musicians but rather citizens.”71 The chapter, like his book on the same topic, is revelatory because exploding commonly held myths or deliberate fabrications about the orchestra as a democratic institution contributing to a better society. Both of his publications about this famous orchestra program are revelatory and highly recommended reading because debunking many of the romantic tales surrounding it. The 2010 book Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice, edited by Thomas Regelski and Terry Gates, similarly often remains at a level of generality in addressing contemporary national and global politics and economics and how they have impacted American music and art education profoundly. Elliott’s own chapter therein, for example, briefly mentions that “conservative forces have been fairly successful in taking control of American education by boiling it down to simplistic issues of economic productivity, a ‘return’ to more ‘rigorous standards,’ … noncritical thinking,” and protecting “traditional American values.”72 That is about the extent of his own social criticism in the book. Once again there are some welcome exceptions in this publication to the political and philosophical abstraction and timidity that infects the work of so many academics in the field and that is likely owing to the lingering effects of the misguided belief in the desired political neutrality of schools and latent aesthetic tendencies operating beneath authors’ and editors’ consciousnesses. The most salient chapters for present purposes from the latter book are by historian David Cavicchi and sociologist John Shepherd. Both authors hit on the fundamental problems and causes of the stagnation and stultification of the music teaching profession, and possibly globally. Whereas the former calls for a fundamental change in how music educators conceptualize their field and their own professional roles and responsibilities so as to be seen by the public and by politicians as more socially, culturally, and politically relevant to the life of the nation, the latter attributes the profession’s stagnation and political vulnerability to a de facto professional policy of isolationism. To quote the introductory sentence to Shepherd’s chapter, “There can be no doubt that we live in a ‘connected’ world,

Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen? 41

that isolation is neither good nor sustained, and that music education continues to counter that trend at the peril of its vulnerability.”73 This problem of professional isolation was another important theme of my previous book, and it remains so throughout this present one. There is “a culture of timidity” within the music teaching profession “regarding issues of power and privilege” and a fear of controversy that combined have long contributed to the relegation of music teaching and learning to the margins of education and thus more vulnerable to elimination from educational institutions.74 As already suggested above in relation to Elliott’s work, one gets the sense that all too many music education academics feel they must tread softly in their publications lest they offend readers! Goble, for example, reassures readers of his 2010 book What’s So Important About Music Education? that he does not mean to cast doubts on the comparative value of democratic capitalism as a social system, as it now seems clear that the great benefits it has provided to citizens of the US (and many other nations)—particularly in terms of personal liberty and quality of life—far outweigh those provided by any previously or subsequently developed form of society.75 Nor am I immune to this tendency to apologize for what some readers might think professional and political apostasy for daring to question the corporate-capitalist state’s control of public education. While writing the preface to this present book, I similarly experienced a need to insert the disclaimer that social and professional criticism are neither necessarily ungodly nor unpatriotic! Nevertheless, as already mentioned in Chapter 1, if music educators are to secure the future of their profession and school programs, they, themselves, must screw up their courage to think and act boldly as public intellectuals in contributing to sometimes difficult discussions and debates in academia and the public realm about the nature and value of education in democratic society and the important roles of music and other arts therein. In short, and if they are not to be political dilettantes or guilty of disingenuousness in masking their own political leanings while using their students as political proxies to engage with their worlds, they will need to courageously and vociferously contribute their own critical voices as musical and artistic citizens to wider professional and public deliberations about remedial educational action for the “nation’s anemic civic health.”76 Indeed, given the arts’ prophetic function in the imagining of new possibilities, the assuaging of social discord, and the amelioration of social injustice by provoking needed change, a case can be made that music and the arts should be made front and center of those deliberations.

Notes 1 National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, A Crucible Moment, 6. 2 Woodford, Democracy and Music Education, xi.

42 Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen?

3 Ibid., 84. 4 Randall Everett Allsup, Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), 111. 5 Paul Woodford, “Escaping vs. Confronting Reality? Politics and Music Education in an Age of Entertainment,” in The Musical Experience: Rethinking Music Teaching and Learning, edited by Janet R. Barrett and Peter R. Webster, 25–42 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in Why I Write (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1984), 109. 7 Ibid., 116. 8 J. Scott Goble, What’s So Important About Music Education? (New York: Routledge, 2010), 144–145. 9 Ibid. See Woodford’s “Escaping vs. Confronting Reality?” for an extended discussion and critique of the music education profession’s dependency on major corporations for repertoire, equipment, and other supplies. 10 Henry Maitles, “What Type of Citizenship Education; What Type of Citizen?” UN Chronicle. The Magazine of the United Nation, 50, no. 4 (December 2013). Available at www.un.org/en/index.html See www.insidehighered.com for information about organized attempts in the United States to expose liberal professors accused by students of advancing “anti-American values” and “leftist propaganda in the classroom.” 11 This quote is my own summary of Dworkin’s thesis. See Woodford, “Escaping vs. Confronting Reality?” (40); Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 12 Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne, “What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy,” American Educational Research Journal 41, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 238. For an overview of several models of democracy, see Jürgen Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts, edited by Steven M. Cahn, 527–534 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also my own chapter “Two Political Models for Music Education and Their Implications for Practice,” in Sound Progress: Exploring Musical Development, edited by Helen Coll and Alexandra Lamont, 109–114 (London, UK: National Association of Music Educators, 2009). 13 Westheimer and Kahne, “What Kind of Citizen,” 241. 14 Ibid., 239. 15 Westheimer, “What Did You Learn in School Today?” 110. 16 Westheimer and Kahne, “What Kind of Citizen,” 242. 17 Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991); see also Paul Woodford, “Dewey’s Bastards: Mursell, Broudy, McMurray, and the Demise of Progressive Music Education. Visions of Research in Music Education, 21 (2012): 14–15, www.rider.edu/~vrme 18 Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 401–402. 19 John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” 1931, in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 6, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). 20 Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul writes that Canada’s health care system, for example, “reflects the balance of community responsibility with individual independence and dignity.” It is based on a “non-charity, inclusive approach that is not derivative of what was done in Europe” and the United States (60). Its judicial system also differs in significant ways from the European and American models. Saul argues in his book A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008) that many of those differences evolved through interactions with Canada’s indigenous peoples (6). 21 Rudyard Griffiths, Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009). For more about differences in social and political values and outlooks between Canadians and Americans, see Paul Woodford, “Why Canada Does Not Have National Standards, or Does It?” Canadian Music Educator 51, no. 2 (2009): 34–39.

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22 Naomi Wolf describes Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as “a distillation of sentiments that were common among his fellow colonists.” Among those sentiments were the “unalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” See her book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 15–16. The political ancestors of today’s Canadians, as described by philosopher Michael Ignatieff in The Rights Revolution (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2000), were “British North Americans, colonial people in refuge from the republican experiment to the south” (13–14). This was fundamental to their sense of national identity and remains “the core of what makes us distinctive as a people” (13–14). 23 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 210. 24 Allsup, Remixing the Classroom, 112. 25 An alternative reason for Allsup’s slip might be that he was under pressure at the time of writing to compose a position paper for the National Association for Music Education supporting the inclusion of independence as a musical standard in the Common Core Standards in music education and was distracted. Wishing to a make a positive contribution to the profession, he nonetheless struggled with the assignment because thinking the pairing of standardization and freedom to be oxymoronic. 26 John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” in Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy, edited by Joseph Ratner, 245–255 (New York: The Modern Library, 1939), 402. 27 Dewey complained in Art As Experience that “the whole conception of morals” in traditional theories of art “is so individualistic that they miss a sense of the way in which art exercises its humane function” (346). 28 Richard Norman, “Freedom, Political,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 291. 29 Allsup, Remixing the Classroom,121. 30 Ibid., 146. 31 Ibid., 133. 32 Ibid. 33 See https://books.google.ca/books/about/Music_Society_Education.html?id=pFO5OJ4B Pu0C; Paul Woodford, “Review of Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, by Christopher Small,” Philosophy of Music Education Review, 9, no. 2 (2002): 45–46. 34 Christopher Small, Music, Society, Education (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1977/1980), 203. 35 Paul Woodford, “The Child as Music Critic,” in The Child as Musician, edited by Gary McPherson and Graham Welch, 284–302. London: Oxford University Press, 2015. 36 Allsup, Remixing the Classroom, 95. 37 Maitles, “What Type of Citizenship Education,” 3. 38 Ibid. 39 Allsup, Remixing the Classroom, 122. The latter quotation about the layering of music’s multiple meanings is from his chapter “The Compositional Turn in Music Education: From Closed Forms to Open Texts,” in Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition, edited by Michele Kaschub and Janice P. Smith, 57–70 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013). No specific page reference is provided for this quotation. 40 Ibid., 123. Allsup is not alone in proposing that improvisation and composition should override performance. He cites the work of Greek scholar Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos in support of his explanations of the democratic potentialities of improvisation and composition. See, for example, the latter author’s article “Envisioning Autonomy through Improvising and Composing: Castoriadis Visiting Creative Music Education Practice,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 44, no. 2 (2012): 151–182. See also Patricia Shehan Campbell (Convenor), “Transforming Music Study from Its Foundations: A Manifesto for Progressive Change in the Undergraduate Preparation of Music Majors,” unpublished Report of the Task Force on the Undergraduate Music Major (Missoula, MT: College Music Society, 2014), 2. Available at https://symposium.music.org/index.php?

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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option=com_k2&view=item&id=10713:report-of-the-task-force-on-the-undergraduatemusic-major&Itemid=133 Allsup, Remixing the Classroom, 111. The quotation itself is from Martha C. Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1010), 72. Allsup, Remixing the Classroom, 123. William Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber & Faber, 1954). Louis Menand, “Re-imagining Liberal Education,” in Education and Democracy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, edited by Robert Orrill (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1997), 17–18. Chomsky, “The Manufacture of Consent,” 126. Rusinek and Aróstegui, “The Politics of Music Teacher Education,” 78. Maitles, “What Type of Citizenship Education,” 3. Dewey, Art As Experience, 346. Ibid., 349. Dewey similarly recommended that teachers direct by indirection, but that advice was likely proffered relatively early in his career. At the height of his powers in the 1930s he insisted that children, youth, and their teachers all be challenged in educational institutions to explore the most contentious social and political issues of the day so “aware of what they are doing and what is being done to them.” See his “Education and Social Change,” 696. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems. Allsup, Remixing the Classroom, 122. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, xvii Many years later, in 1985, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” was named the official anthem of the European Union. See www.europa.eu David J. Elliott, “Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship,” Music Educators Journal, 99, no. 1 (2012): 24. Ibid., 22. Westheimer writes in “What Did You Learn in School Today” that “Conservative pundits have … waged a withering attack on social justice in education” (109). David J. Elliott and Marissa Silverman, Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). The word “democracy” is listed 48 times in the book’s index. Elliott, “Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship,” 23. Ibid. John Dewey, “Education for a Changing Social Order,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 9: 1933–1934, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 159–160. Paul Woodford, “The Eclipse of the Public: A Response to David Elliott’s ‘Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship’,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no.1 (2014): 22–37. Ross Rubenstein, “The Context of Education Policy in the United States and the Intersection of Music Education Policy,” in Policy and the Political Life of Music Education, eds. Patrick Schmidt and Richard Colwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190246143.001.0001. David Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman. “Introduction,” in Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Practice, eds. David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman, 1–27 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199393749.001.0001. This was a possibility raised in my critique of Elliott’s 2012 paper “Music Education as/ for Artistic Citizenship,” that his avoidance of controversy in that and other publications might be in anticipation of negative assessments from conservative editorial boards or fear of angering mainstream music educators. See my article “The Eclipse of the Public.”

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66 Elliott and Silverman, in Music Matters, ask students “Which assumptions, beliefs, and interpretations of basic concepts are most reasonable and justifiable? This is for you to decide according to your skills and understandings … we have not written this book to give you the [italics theirs] answers” (10–12). 67 Ibid., 457. 68 These words by James Madison from the Constitutional Convention can be seen on a video by Norm Chomsky entitled “Requiem for the American Dream” and available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_Ik7OppEI The actual texts can be obtained in book form by compilers Robert Yates and John Lansing, and with the title Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, 1787 (University Press of the Pacific, 2002). 69 Dewey, The Public and Its problems, 200. 70 David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman, eds. Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 71 Geoffrey Baker, “Citizens or Subjects?” in Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Practice, eds. David J. Elliott, Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780199393749.003.0016; Baker’s book is entitled El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 72 David J. Elliott, “Curriculum as Professional Action,” in Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice, edited by Thomas A. Regelski and J. Terry Gates (New York: Springer, 2010), 166. Elliott is summarizing here the ideas of Richard Colwell and Michael Apple. 73 John Shepherd, “Breaking Through Our Own Barriers,” in Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice, edited by Thomas A. Regelski and J. Terry Gates (New York: Springer, 2010), 111; See also in the same book Daniel Cavicchi, “My Music, Their Music, and the Irrelevance of Music Education,” 97–107. 74 The words in quotation marks are from Allsup’s Remixing the Classroom (110) and are part of a statement in which he agrees with me and Estelle Jorgensen that music educators, including many academics, are overly timid about engaging directly in politics. See also Estelle R. Jorgensen, “Pax Americana and the World of Music Education,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 38, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 1–8. 75 Goble, What’s So Important About Music Education? 152. 76 The source for this expression is the previously mentioned one-page flyer from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) website advertising its report of the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, www.aacu.org/crucible

4 HARPERLAND AND CONSERVATIVE DISDAIN FOR MUSIC AND THE ARTS

If you want to keep a secret, you must hide it from yourself. George Orwell, 1984

Philosophy is virtually synonymous with critical inquiry into beliefs and assumptions underlying practice. As music educators Wayne Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega explain, it “often challenges and subverts habitual thought processes, processes that are familiar, reassuring, and consoling.” When it works, “when and if it does,” it is “by generating conceptual tensions that may initially involve confusion and discomfort.”1 This definition thus far is all well and good, but as they continue, philosophy is not restricted to pure intellection. “It probes and explores whatever it encounters” and thus overlaps with other disciplines and domains, including politics and history.2 As Dewey said long ago, the proper subject of philosophical inquiry ought to be the problems of man, which requires some understanding of their social origins if they are to be redressed. The subject of this chapter is the curious and longstanding disdain of some conservatives for “elite” musicians and artists and experts of all kinds. Given the information presented in Chapter 2 about the many contributions of music and the other performing arts to the economy and to the enrichment of democratic society and culture, one might assume that conservatives and neoliberals would place a relatively high value on them in society and education. In Canada, for example, as reported by internationally renowned novelist Margaret Atwood in 2008 in a retort to a disparaging comment about the arts made by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “total attendance for ‘the arts’ … in fact exceeds that for sports events,” while employment figures for the arts were “roughly the same as agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil & gas, and utilities combined.”3 Despite these figures and levels of public support, and following the success of the Conservative Party in the federal election of 2006, Harper almost immediately began

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whittling away at federal funding for the arts and related institutions such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the Canada Council for the Arts, both of which had long championed the arts because deemed essential to Canadian culture and to national and regional identity, not to mention to the economy. When questioned by the media about those reductions in funding for the arts and arts-related institutions, Harper, an economist by training, derided so-called serious artists and musicians as a class of rich and whining creative elites who were overly dependent on government subsidy and for whom “average Canadians have no sympathy.”4 “Ordinary” Canadians were disinterested in their work. This attempt to brand certain kinds of artists and musicians as elitist snobs outraged members of the arts community, of whom Atwood became its unofficial champion and media spokesperson. Responding in the national newspaper The Globe and Mail to Harper’s derogatory description of the arts as rarefied creative pursuits, Atwood countered that creativity was in fact “ordinary” because a natural and thus “normal human characteristic: All children are born creative. It’s the lack of any appreciation of these activities that is not ordinary.”5

The muzzling of experts and cultural elites As will quickly become evident to American readers in the following pages, there is much to be learned about their own country’s politics from Harper’s interactions with artists and musicians. Although an avid supporter of Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal Party in his youth, Harper later underwent a conversion to American neoconservatism that provided the foundation for his political career. Among the first of Atwood’s proposed explanations for Harper’s prejudice against artists was political ideology. Steeped in American neoconservative and neoliberal writings and ideology from his undergraduate and graduate studies in economics at the University of Calgary in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Harper was determined to move the nation further to the political right.6 Artists were more likely to vote liberal or socialist than they were to vote conservative and, moreover, were a “mouthy lot” who refused to defer to authority and hence should be “muzzled” lest they mobilized and challenged his neoconservative and neoliberal agenda for Canadian society.7 Harper’s assault on the broader arts community was thus likely part of a deliberate campaign to silence political opposition to conservative social, economic, and cultural reform. As Atwood continued in Orwellian terms, as every “budding dictatorship” knows, you can always get some tame artists to design the uniforms and flags and the documentary about you, and so forth—the only kind of art that you need— but individual voices must be silenced, because there shall only be One Voice: Our Master’s Voice.8 This might all sound paranoid to readers unfamiliar with Canadian politics, but even before his election as Prime Minister in 2006, Harper had made no secret of

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his disdain for Keynesian economics and the welfare state, and including, as we have seen, public subsidy of the arts.9 He was notoriously secretive about his private life and social values—he remains a mystery to the majority of Canadians— and for more than a decade ruled the federal Conservative Party with an iron fist.10 Conservative parliamentarians, federal bureaucrats, and scientists alike were all severely constrained by the Prime Minister’s Office in what they were permitted to say to the public about political or other issues that might have been perceived as threatening to big business and to the Conservative government’s social agenda for the country.11 One federal environmental scientist in the Ottawa area was even suspended in 2015 for composing and publicly singing a song entitled “Harperman, A Protest Song” that was critical of Harper’s environmental policies and politics.12 Harper famously ignored the warnings of government scientists about global warming because deemed a threat to the vast Canadian oil industry. He also limited the power of Statistics Canada to collect information about employment, education, or income that had long informed policy-making at all governmental levels.13 According to Harper’s critics, these acts constituted a double threat to democracy because limiting access of politicians to the “comprehensive data” needed to engage in “evidence-based decision-making” while making it more difficult for the media and the public to monitor and thereby hold government democratically accountable.14 Without that information, government was far more likely to serve the interests of big business as political decision-making was driven by ideology rather than based on scientific and socio-cultural inquiry and evidence.15 So-called elite musicians and artists were thus by no means the only experts whom Harper had attempted to muzzle. According to one prominent newspaper columnist, Harper was “suspicious of ‘enemies’ in the civil service, civic society, and judiciary, and willing to use the institutions of the state to stir public resentments against them.”16 Needless to say, Harper was also wary of mainstream media news reporters and columnists (whom his ardent supporters accused of a liberal bias) allowing them only very limited access to him and his ministers for questioning of government policy and practice.17 Indeed, Harper was wary of elites and experts of all kinds, including academics. His wariness of academics has been linked to his first experience with higher education at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Like its elite forerunners in Britain, Trinity College traditionally catered to the children of social elites, the “young men and women who would go on to run the businesses, lead the political parties, manage the bureaucracies, and shape the arts and academies of English Central Canada.”18 A product of public schools and unable to “fit in to this new world,” Harper quit after only two weeks of classes, an experience which his biographer claims “produced a deep ambivalence toward academia” and that marked his politics.19 Thereafter, and following repeated attempts as a graduate student to “drop in and out” of university, Harper resolved to resist “taking orders from other people. Starting with his professors.”20 This wariness of social elites and experts is a point to which we will turn shortly, including Harper’s hypocrisy in using popular music performance to mask his own elite status as an expert economist, politician, and musician.

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A Conservative country? Despite abundant media criticism of Harper’s muzzling of artists, civil servants, and conservative politicians, the results of the 2011 federal election were interpreted by many of his supporters as suggesting that he had been successful in shifting the country somewhat further to the political right. After finally achieving his “much sought after majority” of seats in the House of Commons, Harper was heard to tell his followers “that Canada was now a conservative country.”21 The accuracy of this claim was difficult to gauge at the time, as his majority in the House was acquired with only 39.6 percent of the popular vote, as compared to 37.7 percent in the previous election.22 History has since cast doubt on this claim of Harper’s Conservatives moving the country much further to the political right, as his government was soundly defeated in the October 2015 election, with the Liberal Party under drama teacher Justin Trudeau (former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s son) trouncing the Conservatives with 184 parliamentary seats compared to the latter’s 90. Few, however, would challenge the assertion that Harper was the chief strategist and primary agent of the Conservatives’ former electoral successes.23

Just an ordinary guy? Notwithstanding his electoral victories in 2008 and 2011, Harper suffered politically and learned from his attempt to “brand the arts as an elite concern,” and particularly in Quebec where his stance on the arts likely cost him seats in Parliament.24 Quebecers regard the arts as important to their own unique sense of cultural identity within Canada. Many other Canadians, however, were equally offended by his generalization that they were disinterested in the arts. Realizing from his 2008 gaff that so-called elite artists and musicians were indeed an articulate and politically engaged and media-savvy community that was best not provoked directly, Harper subsequently tried to repair the damage to his public persona through frequent performances of popular music. As a pianist and singer, he performed what has been described as a litany of “the 20th century’s most inoffensive, easy-to-sing rock music”25 at Conservative Party and public functions to re-brand himself as “just an ordinary, arts-loving guy”26 and to curry favor among an electorate that ironically viewed him as somewhat aloof, “even reluctant—in his public appearances.”27 Performances of the music of, for example, the Beatles, Dwight Yoakam, and the Guess Who afforded him opportunities to counter this public perception of him as emotionally reserved while capitalizing on older citizens’ associations with that music to “short-circuit [their political] cynicism and appeal to them emotionally without the usual filters.”28 Politicians, of course, have long used popular music as thematic background for conventions and other public events to build morale among the rank and file and to establish emotional connections with reluctant or undecided voters in hopes of improving voter approval ratings. Republican politicians in the United States are notorious for co-opting popular anti-capitalist and anti-establishment protest songs

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and their lyrics to appeal to the common or working man or woman, even as their policies, such as Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down” economic theory, tended to favor the rich. Donald Trump was only the latest in a long line of republicans to have followed this practice when he misappropriated Canadian Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” for use as a rallying cry for his 2016 Presidential campaign.29 The song was originally composed to mock President George H. Bush’s economic policies that contributed to greater social and economic inequality in the United States. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” was similarly misappropriated by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 second Presidential campaign, a fact that propelled Springsteen into the political limelight to emphasize his working class roots and political sympathies.30 As Reagan’s advisors knew, the key factor when deciding which music to appropriate for their own political ends was that it should be idealistic: It should inspire the public by appealing to their emotions and to patriotic or other sentimental values such as world peace that can be cynically employed to seduce impressionable voters.31 As one of Reagan’s advisors warned, “if we allow any Democrat to claim optimism or idealism as his issue … we will lose the election.”32 Prime Minister Harper was similarly criticized by political opponents and professional musicians and composers for co-opting popular songs the lyrics of which, such as “Share the Land” by the Guess Who and John Lennon’s “Imagine,’ were either originally intended by their composers as expressions of resistance to capitalism, such as was the case with the former tune, or, in the case of the latter tune, as rejection of western militarism and violence. By cynically including those songs in his list of otherwise “inoffensive, easy-to-sing rock music,” Harper reduced them to a saccharine sentimentalism that diverted the attention of the public from his government’s social and militarist foreign policy by promoting the myths of Canadian innocence and of the necessity of political unity in the face of terrorism.33 As already suggested, Harper was thus by no means unusual in co-opting antiestablishment popular music for his own political purposes. Nor was he the first national leader to perform publicly as a musician. American Presidents Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, all formerly highly trained musicians, performed while in office. Clinton had at one time even contemplated a career in music.34 President Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Mitt Romney also sang at public events, although, owing to lack of musical training and ability, they wisely limited their performances to short songs or song fragments. In this age of ubiquitous social media, politicians can reap significant political rewards for public music-making, but there is always the risk of ridicule for mistakes.35 Like Nixon, Harper had the childhood advantage of fairly substantial piano training in classical music performance, although like many youth in the 1970s and later generations, his musical tastes were influenced by societal changes.36 After the rise of the American civil rights, black, anti-war, and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s, along with improved access of middle and, to a lesser extent, working class youth to universities where they were encouraged to question the status quo, western classical music had already begun to lose its luster among the young as they began to

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challenge “stereotypes … with which they had been brought up.”37 Conservative politicians, teachers, and middle class parents had formerly placed a cultural and educational premium on classical music training for its aristocratic and elitist associations, and as a bulwark against lowbrow culture, but that began to change among youth with their “insatiable demand” for popular music “fueled by teenage dreams and adolescent insecurities.”38 In response to the continued burgeoning and merger of popular culture and media in the succeeding years, today’s populist politicians of all stripes—even those with substantial background and training in classical music such as Harper—are far more likely to resort to vernacular music and culture as “pollsters ask voters … which candidate they’d prefer to share a beer with.”39

The taming of culture The speed of this sea change in cultural values was increased with Margaret Thatcher’s ascendency to high political office in 1979 and the subsequent rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic discourse of our times. According to the neoliberal world view—and while many of Thatcher’s conservative followers would have preferred the cultural status quo, including western classical music— free trade, money, and consumer choice largely trumped traditional values.40 Virtually everything, including culture and many public services, was conceived in terms of commodities the value of which was to be determined by the markets rather than by government fiat. As just suggested above, whereas so-called serious music and art were formerly deemed by governments as public goods because thought to be humanizing and contributing to the civic and intellectual life of the nation, they were now regarded by neoliberal purists as undeserving of public subsidy because only niche markets that existed, or not, at the pleasure of consumers.41 This served the joint neoliberal and conservative purpose of weakening the “Keynesian social democratic welfare state,” but conservatives soon began to worry the increasing liberalization of the arts would undermine the moral fiber of, and thereby weaken, the nation.42 Philosopher Vernon Howard helps to explain this point with his observation that conservative disdain for the arts arose in the 1970s and 1980s as artists and musicians “began to threaten moral sensibilities. The licentiousness of popular music, the emergence of gay and lesbian themes, feminism, anti-war sentiments, but especially the Mapplethorpe affair in the United States, sent the moralists and politicians reeling in revulsion.”43 Older readers may recall that American conservatives in the late 1980s were outraged to learn a homoerotic exhibit by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe scheduled to take place in a Washington, DC gallery had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservative congressmen, led by Senator Jesse Helms, organized a campaign to “prevent Federal funds from being used to ‘promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials … or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion.’”44 Several decades later, in 2008, Harper’s Conservative government similarly closed down a federal program that

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helped musicians and artists promote their work abroad on the grounds that some of it was deemed offensive and unrepresentative of Canadian values.45 The American and Canadian neoconservative response to this perceived moral threat of music and the arts to the security of the nation was a puritanical desire to establish what they regarded as an appropriate level of control over society through the taming of culture! Hence Harper’s primary motive for his attacks on elite musicians and artists and his treatment of politically charged popular music for his own ends. For to the neoconservative mind, and as already illustrated with reference to Harper’s musical politics, the arts are powerful tools for shaping public values and sensibilities in at least several related ways: for seducing or otherwise appealing to the masses via “popular emotions to mitigate social and economic struggle rather than through rational collective action;” for neutralizing their political meanings, reducing them to anodyne entertainment for purposes of diversion; or, as we saw with Reagan and Trump, misappropriating and repurposing their idealistic or other meanings.46 Most importantly for present purposes, neoconservatives realized the arts could be reconceived and utilized as sites for moral reprobation and thereby also as loci of control to “enforce particular moral codes and ways of life so as to re-adjust the moral balance of American society.”47

An aestheticization of politics Jean-François Drolet, in American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism, describes this latter practice as an “aestheticization of politics … [that] draws on the power of symbol and images to discipline and steer society” by replacing “persuasive rational argumentation by strict demonstration” and the cultivation of a “fear and loathing of the undesirable other.”48 Here we get to crux of conservative disdain for certain musicians and artists, as well as the formers’ propensity for using music especially as a political tool and site for moral reprobation. For as Drolet continues, Neoconservatism negotiates the tension between its commitment to market capitalism and liberal democracy on the one hand, and its commitment to conservative socio-cultural values on the other by means of a symbolic politics of security that places the myth of the undesirable other and the enemy of society at the centre of public policy debates. By doing so, the neoconservative practices of statecraft translate into an executive-centred conception of politics in which the elite must produce social order through the sovereign allocation of right and wrong.49 Government functions as moral tutor to the nation. And within this political scheme, if the desired cultural homogeneity and national unity deemed necessary for national security are to be obtained, neoconservatives must “mark the fundamental political distinction between us and them … as the main organizational social bond.”50 Implied is a Platonic and Orwellian conception of music and art

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coupled with an antagonistic politics that “forces a transcendent element of irrationalism not admitting of compromise into the public sphere that negates liberal and pluralist conceptions of politics altogether,” effectively narrowing the range of conceivable thought while stifling dissent through the fostering of a culture of fear based on the myth of the “relationship between protection and obedience.”51 As we have already seen, but that needs to be emphasized, the arts are important to the neoconservative project not only because theirs is the realm of symbol, imagery, and irrationality but also because they are among the primary means whereby this “distinction between” and labelling of “us and them” is made.52 The arts are powerful modes of communication but they are also imaginative and symbolic expressions of personal and cultural values, morals, and identity and hence of great importance to the neoconservative agenda, which is as much about culture and the development of the right kind of moral character as it is about economics.53 As Drolet continues, neoconservatives seek to gain control over the spheres of cultural production, reproduction, and reception in part through the labelling of progressive artists, musicians, and academics whose social criticism and ideas might undermine the moral authority of state institutions. This labelling of social progressives as “undesirable others” also helps explain Harper’s distrust of academics. Consistent with the earlier reference in this chapter to the liberalizing effects of the opening of public universities to larger numbers of middle and some working class youth in the 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives view academics as “the most influential and subversive of all” citizens because “more likely to adopt radical views” that might impact social policy, and because having increasing access to susceptible students.54 Academics, journalists, and liberal artists and musicians constitute a new class of leftist intellectuals that wields “influence … through the interpretation of cultural symbols” that might change how individuals think. They accordingly need to be neutralized lest they continue to disturb “the frame of intelligibility through which Americans have historically understood their political experience.”55 Ironically, all the while Reagan and his neoconservative friends were calling for smaller government, they were seeking to extend its reach into the minds of Americans through the taming of culture!

A feigned musical amateurism The foregoing goes a long way to explaining former Canadian Prime Minister Harper’s hostile attitude toward and derision of musicians, artists, academics, and others perceived as a threat to his own neoconservative project of changing how Canadians think about their society and world. What remains to be addressed is his hypocrisy in deriding experts and elites given his own undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics and his former role as Prime Minister and chief economist of Canada, all of which placed him at the pinnacle of the Canadian social and political elite. As with so much of Harper’s politics, some of the answers to questions about his personal hypocrisy in this matter are found in the annals of American neoconservatism.56

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American neoconservatives have a relatively lengthy history of derogating experts and elites, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s 1964 accusation that liberals placed too much faith in “an intellectual elite in a far-distant capital [that] can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”57 Reagan was a supporter of conservative presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon later similarly derided bureaucratic elites, but it was Spiro Agnew who had the most impact in this regard among right wing politicians with the help of speech writers Pat Buchanan and William Safire.58 Agnew famously derided liberal media critics and academics as an “effete corps of impudent snobs.”59 As Eric Alterman writes in The Nation, “since then, no right-wing campaign has been complete without some form of repudiation of what former Vice President Dan Quayle named the liberal ‘cultural elite.’”60 This branding of those with whom they disagreed as elites was a brilliant tactical maneuver because allowing conservative leaders to position themselves as oppressed underdogs representing the silent majority of Americans while masking their own elite familial and personal histories of privilege, educational credentials, expertise, and wealth. Talk show host and author Laura Ingraham epitomizes conservative hypocrisy in labeling opponents “elites” while possessing considerable personal wealth, educational credentials, and expertise of her own.61 Among her many publications was her 2006 book Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the Media are Subverting America. Like other conservative politicians and pundits, Ingraham failed to adequately define the term “elite,” wielding it as “a contentless cudgel with which to beat back one’s opponents without the trouble of engaging their arguments.”62 Harper thus differed little from American neoconservatives in employing the charge of elitism as a “contentless cudgel” to silence opposition while also using popular music as a diversion and smokescreen to mask his own elite status. Where he differed most from his American counterparts with respect to the use of music, however, was less in the frequency of his performances—although it was that, too—as it was in his dissimilation with respect to the extent of his own musical abilities. Whereas Richard Nixon, for example, made no attempt to mask his own prowess as a classically trained musician, Harper chose to present himself as an amateur musician. He was more deliberate than his American counterparts in how he represented himself to the public through his musicianship lest it reveal too much of his own talent and ability. This practice of musical dissimilitude was something that our ancestors understood. Italian Renaissance courtier Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) admonished would-be leaders against “showing off what they knew, and often don’t know” musically lest it bred over-familiarity and contempt. It was far better to project an attitude of humility and “feigned amateurism” to avoid creating the impression that they seem to have come along just for this purpose and that it is their main pursuit in life. So the courtier should turn to music as if it were a pastime of his and he is yielding to persuasion.… I wish him to dissimulate the care

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and effort that are necessary for competent performance; and he should let it be seen as if he himself thinks nothing of his accomplishment which, because of its excellence, he makes others think highly of.”63 Harper is not quite as amateurish as he would like people to believe, having studied piano and music theory in his childhood sufficiently seriously to pass the Royal Conservatory of Toronto Grade Nine standards for performance and Grade Three music theory.64 Both of those levels are typically about what is expected of applicants seeking admittance to undergraduate university music programs and are thus by definition indicative of above average ability. Moreover, and as one critic of Harper’s music-making reminds us, it takes “years of practice and patience” to become sufficiently competent and confident to perform with world renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma on the main stage of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, the venue for his aforementioned first public performance as Prime Minister in 2009.65 This gave him a decided advantage over those lacking the requisite musical skills and confidence to impress their audiences. By dissimulating “the care and effort that are necessary for competent performance,” as Castiglione advised, Harper surprised his audiences with his talent and stage deportment, thereby raising himself in their estimation. All this may sound somewhat Machiavellian, but as already shown elsewhere in this chapter, Harper was notoriously overly-controlling of government and federal bureaucracy and was determined to muzzle artists and musicians perceived to be either a threat to conservative rule or who could be scapegoated for societal problems. It was not for nothing that one of the chapters in his biography is titled “Control.”66 Critics have gone so far as to complain that his government’s puritanical values, obsessive control, “autocracy, secretiveness, and cruelty … debase politics to a level that threatens the very foundations of Canadian democracy.”67 While an exaggeration, there is, it needs to acknowledged, a Machiavellian thread to neoconservative ideology that can be traced through the works of German philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973). Strauss’s writings provided neoconservatives “with vital intellectual ammunition” to fight the culture wars.68 Harper famously claimed to be a pragmatist in the sense of doing whatever was necessary to ‘get the job done’ and to preserve his government, which is similar to Machiavelli’s statement to the effect that the ‘ends justify the means,’ divorced from moral considerations. It is thus by no means a stretch to infer that Harper’s musical dissimilation was deliberate and related to his general way of thinking and acting in the political realm. Popular music performance was one of many political tools in his employ, albeit an especially potent one with respect to raising his public profile and brand as he sought to establish what he deemed an appropriate measure of moral sway over Canadian society.

Lessons to be learned in the age of the new authoritarianism Among the many educational lessons to be learned by music and art teacher educators from this excavation of some of the political, philosophical, and historical

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roots of Stephen Harper’s and American neoconservatives’ disdain for certain kinds of musicians and artists and their work, the most important is that the young should be encouraged to attempt to go beyond surface appearances to unearth, or if necessary to infer, the underlying ideological beliefs and intentions of those who would manipulate “our aesthetic sensibilities against our best interests.”69 This is often no easy task, but we should always remember that the arts are never politically neutral or always benign and that, in the absence of an education in which children and youth learn how they are employed by all manner of people and institutions to shape their values and opinions, they are likely to be subject to “the tyranny of perceptions—the victorious opinions hanging over us like a smog from which no relief can be expected.”70 As Howard reminds us, Dewey conceived of art “as a vital component of moral education (as a similar form of judgement and interpretation) to prevent its ossification into rigid rules and dogma” that prevent or override thought.71 Dewey’s ideas about the arts as essential to the defense of democracy because “keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit” are well known.72 Art exercised imagination thereby providing the intellectual wherewithal for individuals to achieve the necessary synthesis of the actual and the possible that was a hallmark of “conscious life” which Dewey described as “a continual beginning afresh.”73 Consciousness arose in the “fusion of old meanings and new situations that transfigures both (a transformation that defines imagination),” generating new meanings and understandings of the relation between the past and present that could inform personal agency as individuals anticipated the future.74 Musicians and artists were moral prophets who conveyed “the meaning of the past that is significant in present experience and is prophetic of the larger movement of the future. Only imaginative vision elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual.”75 Readers may recall from the previous chapters that Dewey also noted that “The first stirrings of dissatisfaction and the first intimations of a better future are always found in works of art.”76 Doubtless this is among the reasons why leaders such as Harper, and now Trump, exhibiting authoritarian tendencies have always been wary of avant-garde or otherwise provocative musicians and artists—and historically have sought to censure or otherwise tame them—because likely to stimulate the imagination of the masses leading to conscious awareness of social problems and political dissatisfaction thereof. Novelist Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale, first published in 1985 and later staged as an opera, illustrates Dewey’s ideas about art’s dual functions as prophecy and provocation through the fusing of the past with the present. Based on seventeenth century American Puritan values that Atwood contends remain deeply embedded in the American psyche, and particularly among conservatives, her book presents a dystopian vision of a future America under a religious dictatorship in which a “pariah caste” of fertile women is forced to bear children for social elites.77 Like Orwell, Atwood intended her book to be prophetic and

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provocative, warning of signs of a possible return in the United States to “the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.”78 Just recently, in 2017, Atwood expressed her concern that the social instability caused by Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency might spark a resurgence of Puritan values among those on the extreme right wing of American politics. Less well-known among todays’ teachers is that Dewey regarded history as “the most effective conscious tool for moral instruction,”79 but only if it helped children to “see in imagination the forces which favour men’s cooperation with one another, to understand the sorts of character that help and that hold back.”80 Atwood’s book also illustrates Dewey’s acknowledgement of the revelatory potential of the coupling of art with history in helping children realize how the past is in the present. Rather than teaching art or history as canonical knowledge for memorization and regurgitation, which bred intellectual passivity by “overemphasizing convention and tradition,” Dewey recommended that the instructional emphasis should be on critical analysis “of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, making known the forces which have [in the past] woven the pattern.”81 These latter social forces were the “old” meanings out of which consciousness arose in response to new situations and ideas as individuals sought greater clarity and synthesis of experience. Consciousness “marked the place where the formed disposition and the immediate situation touch and interact” and varied in acuteness and intensity to the degree of intellectual readjustment required to reconcile the past with the present, “approaching nil as the contact is frictionless and interaction fluid. It is turbid when meanings are undergoing reconstruction in an undetermined direction, and becomes clear as a decisive meaning emerges” resulting in conscious awareness of problems, their origins, conditions, and implications.82 There are two profound pedagogical implications arising from the foregoing discussion of Dewey’s ideas about the natures and respective roles of artistic, historical, and critical thinking in music or art education as they relate to conscious experience that need to be stated here more explicitly for emphasis and by way of concluding this chapter. The first is that children and youth require far more study of music and art history—in the abovementioned Deweyan sense of learning how the past is in the present through the exercise of imagination and “critical synthetic thinking”—than is traditionally allowed them in educational institutions because this is vital for achieving the synthesis of experience necessary for consciousness of social problems.83 As Paulo Freire once stated in an interview, if critical consciousness of our world is to be attained, “we have to understand how history is walking with us and because of us, while at the same time conditioning us to walk like this.”84 Hence my own emphases in this present chapter and book, which speak to history as much as to music, art, philosophy, sociology, political science, or other disciplines and fields, illustrating Dewey’s warning that we cannot adequately understand present problems or intelligently anticipate the future without first knowing something of their historical roots and the conditions that gave rise to

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them.85 Nor can the young intelligently employ music and the other arts as political protest tools when lacking the appropriate understanding of socio-political contexts and conditions, including the ethical considerations thereof.86 As was acknowledged at the outset, this book is also deliberately provocative as, among other reasons, traditional historical knowledge and pedagogical practice are not likely to prepare students to identify, let alone resist or reject, the agendas of those who would manipulate their aesthetic or other sensibilities. Rather the opposite; they are more likely to indoctrinate because representing the status quo and therefore taught as “frictionless,” demanding little conscious effort on the parts of percipients because taken for granted as truth. If children and youth are to become more conscious of their world and its problems, they should be confronted frequently in education with new and provocative ideas, interpretations, and pedagogical practices that can challenge them to question what they think they know resulting in “a widening and deepening of conscious life—a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings.”87 Standardization of curriculum, memorization, routinization of practice through over-reliance on methods and core repertory, and avoidance of provocative new ideas and musical or other interpretations because potentially controversial—all of which epithets have been applied to music teachers—are the death of creativity and consciousness insomuch as stifling thought and thus not worthy of the adjective educational in the deepest sense of contributing to human freedom and personal and moral agency. The educational implication is that the frequent introduction of new and provocative, even contentious, ideas in music or other classes can help the young conceptualize those subjects as processes of continuous renewal through which they can gain a better grasp of how social forces and their respective “discourses function to construct [their] realities.”88 American neoconservatism is just one of many social and historical forces and discourses that have shaped the public’s perceptions of reality and to which children and youth should attend in their schooling if they are to defend their own intellectual and cultural interests while learning how to “hold power accountable.”89 Recall from this chapter that neoconservatives wished to establish a level of control over society through the taming of culture and the neutralizing of education. Among their most potent strategies for exercising their control over education, and that they have shared with neoliberals and others, has been the aforementioned fostering of the myth of the political neutrality of schools that has worked to delimit American and other teachers’ understandings of curriculum and professional practice, effectively reducing schooling to vocational training or to banality as students are conceived as either workers or consumers in training.90 To reiterate a sentence by music educator David Elliott that was quoted in the previous chapter, “conservative forces have been fairly successful in taking control of American education by boiling it down to simplistic issues of economic productivity, a ‘return’ to more ‘rigorous standards,’ and non-critical thinking.”91 Elliott is correct in his assessment of the success of conservative intrusions into public education. These particular educational values, however, are actually neoliberal ones

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that conservatives adopted because they favor the wealthy and because they were also thought by them to foster the creation of “self-reliant” and “uncomplaining” citizens.92 As should be evident by now, neoliberals are as much to blame as neoconservatives for the current state of education because they provided the economic ideology and vision now serving as a mechanism for control of all education. To quote Henry Giroux’s description of the neoliberal conception of, and agenda, for education in Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism, education is now largely about training, creating an elite class of managers, and eviscerating those forms of knowledge that conjure up what might be considered dangerous forms of moral witnessing and collective political action. Any subject or mode of knowledge that does not serve the instrumental needs of capitalism is rendered disposable.”93 Music and the arts are among those school subjects regarded by neoliberals as dangerous and therefore disposable.94 This theme of neoliberal dominance and control of education and its negative impacts on music education and the arts and humanities is explored at greater length in the following chapter and in Chapter 7.

Notes 1 Wayne Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega, eds., “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5–6. 2 Bowman and Frega, “What Should the Music Education Profession Expect of Philosophy?” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, 18. 3 Margaret Atwood, “To Be Creative Is, In Fact, Canadian,” Globe and Mail, September 24, 2008, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/to-be-creative-is-in-fact-canadian/ article1062390/ 4 Robert Benzie, Bruce Campion-Smith, and Les Whittington, “Ordinary Folks Don’t Care About Arts: Harper,” Toronto Star, September 24, 2008, www.thestar.com/news/ politics/federalelection/2008/09/24/ordinary_folks_dont_care_about_arts_harper.html 5 Atwood, “To Be Creative Is, In Fact, Canadian,” para. 7. 6 John Ibbitson, Stephen Harper (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015), 48. Harper’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics, awarded in 1985 and 1991, respectively, were both from the department of political science at the University of Calgary. Founded by American neoconservatives in the late 1960s, this department was an anomaly among Canadian universities. Harper’s biographer describes it as having “closer intellectual ties to American libertarian [and neoconservative] thinking than to anything coming out of the Canadian universities to the east, or out of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, for that matter” (28). One academic critic from eastern Canada even went so far as to describe it as “the department of redneckology” (29). 7 Atwood, “To Be Creative Is, In Fact, Canadian,” para. 9. See also Andrew McIntosh, “Stephen Harper,” www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/stephen-joseph-harper/ 8 Atwood, “To Be Creative Is, In Fact, Canadian,” para. 9. 9 Vernon A. Howard, “Must Music Education Have an Aim?” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, edited by Wayne D. Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 256. 10 Tristin Hopper, “Stephen Harper’s Infinite Playlist: PM’s Musical Repertoire Plays It Safe, But Has Touch of Humour,” National Post, December 10, 2014, http://news.

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11 12 13 14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/stephen-harpers-infinite-playlist-pmsmusical-repertoire-plays-it-safe-but-has-touch-of-humour Jeffrey Simpson, “Weak Conservative Lineup Reflection of Harper’s Leadership,” Globe and Mail, October 2, 2015, p. A13. Haydn Watters, “Federal Scientist Put On Leave Over Harperman Protest Song,” August 28, 2015, www.cbc.ca/news/politics/harperman-tony-turner-scientist-investigation-1.3207390 Editorial, “Long-Form Census is Needed for Good Decision-making,” Toronto Star, February 5, 2015, www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2015/02/05/long-form-censusis-needed-for-good-decision-making-editorial.htm Carol Linnitt, “Harper’s Attack on Science: No Science, No Evidence, No Truth, No Democracy,” Academic Matters (May 2013), 3, www.academicmatters.ca/2013/05/harp ers-attack-on-science-no-science-no-evidence-no-truth-no-democracy/ See Also Lawrence Martin, “Democracy Canadian-Style: How Do You Like It So Far?” Globe and Mail, December 17, 2009, p. A29. Ibid. See also the above Toronto Star editorial “Long-Form Census” complaining that “Key decisions by all levels of government are being made more and more on ideology and guess-work rather than hard statistical evidence. Policy makers are groping in the dark,” www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2015/02/05/long-form-census-is-neededfor-good-decision-making-editorial.html Jeffrey Simpson, “Nixon, Harper and the Hallmarks of Power,” Globe and Mail, August 6, 2015, p. A13, www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/nixon-harper-and-the-hallmarksof-power/article25852078/ Media pundit Ezra Levant, one of Harper’s most prominent supporters and apologists, accused the “Media Party” and universities of a liberal “leftist” bias. In a commentary published just days after the October 19, 2015 election that the Conservatives lost to the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau, Levant described universities as “overwhelmingly liberal.” “Law schools are uniformly leftist and activist, and that seeps into the courts.” Even public schools have a liberal bias because influenced by environmental activists such as David Suzuki and “political teachers’ unions.” Pop culture, too, “is leftist.” Ezra Levant, “The Conservative Comeback: Advice from Four Key Tories,” London Free Press, October 24, 2016, p. B2. John Ibbitson, “Stephen Harper: The Making of a Prime Minister,” Globe and Mail, July 2015, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/stephen-harper-the-making-of-a-primeminister/article25809825/ Ibid. Ibid. McIntosh, “Stephen Harper,” www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/stephen-jo seph-harper/ Although it may be true that Harper moved Canada somewhat further to the political right, even if only temporarily, an important plank in Trudeau’s electoral platform, as stated in a background document to Liberal policy statements for the future, was “to reinvest in our cultural and creative industries,” including the doubling of financial support for the Canada Council for the Arts and an additional 150 million dollars for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). See www.liberal.ca/liberalsto-invest-in-canadian-culture-and-middle-class-jobs/ These percentages are from a government website documenting electoral results by party, see www.parl.gc.ca/parlinfo/Compilations/ElectionsAndRidings/ResultsParty.aspx McIntosh, “Stephen Harper,” para. 22. Kate Taylor, “Harper Picks and Chooses His Arts and Culture,” Globe and Mail, December 12, 2014, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/harp er-picks-and-chooses-his-arts-and-culture/article22069453/ Hopper, “Stephen Harper’s Infinite Playlist,” para. 3. Taylor, “Harper Picks and Chooses His Arts,” para. 4. Ishmael N. Daro, “With a Little Help from the Piano: How Stephen Harper Uses Pop Music to Soften his Public Image Among Voters,” National Post, June 6, 2015, http:// news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/pop-music-and-politics-787126

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28 Ibid., para. 1, 11. The article, however, was inspired by, and reported on, a paper by Carleton University lecturer John Higney entitled “Mixing Pop and Politics: Stephen Harper’s Musical Amateurism as Personal Branding.” Higney’s paper was presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa in May 30-June 5, 2015. For a more complete list of musicians and musical groups whose music Harper used see Hopper’s “Stephen Harper’s Infinite Playlist.” 29 Jason Newman, “R.E.M. to Trump, Other Pols: ‘Go F—k Yourselves’ for Using Our Music,” Rolling Stone, September 9, 2015, www.rollingstone.com/music/news/r-e-mto-trump-other-pols-go-f–k-yourselves-for-using-our-music-20150909 30 Marc Dolan, “How Ronald Reagan Changed Bruce Springsteen’s Politics,” Politico, June 4, 2014, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/bruce-springsteen-ronaldreagan-107448 31 Ibid. According to Dolan, conservative columnist George Will attended a concert by Springsteen in 1984 and subsequently wrote that “If all Americans in labor and management, who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism.” 32 Ibid. 33 Hopper, “Stephen Harper’s Infinite Play List,” para. 4. 34 Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, “The Presidents of the United States of America,” (Washington, DC: The White House Historical Association, 2006), www.whitehouse. gov/1600/presidents/williamjclinton 35 Jon Pareles, “A Humanizing Tune from the Songster in Chief,” New York Times, February 22, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/arts/music/presidents-sometimes-takethe-role-of-first-musician.html?_r=0 36 Ibbitson, Stephen Harper, 16. 37 Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (New York: Verso, 2008), 582. 38 Ibid., 549. 39 Pareles, “A Humanizing Tune,” para. 4. 40 Jean-François Drolet, American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of A Reactionary Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 113. Among the conservatives’ exceptions to the latter are so-called family values traditionally associated with dominant white, Christian, heterosexual couples and their children. 41 Derek B. Scott, “Music and Sociology for the 1990s: A Changing Perspective,” Musical Quarterly 74, no. 3 (1990): 385–410. Scott referred to a gradual “collapse of modernist idealism” through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s as spelling an end to the dominance of the western art music tradition and associated aesthetic values (387–388). 42 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 114. 43 Howard, “Must Music Education Have an Aim?” 256. 44 Tom Wicker, “In The Nation; Art and Indecency,” New York Times, July 28, 1989, www.nytimes.com/1989/07/28/opinion/in-the-nation-art-and-indecency.html 45 James Bradshaw, “Independent Artists Angry Over Lost Grants,” Globe and Mail, September 18, 2009, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/independent-artists-angryover-lost-grants/article1202685/ 46 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 117 47 Ibid., 113. One neoconservative strategy for undermining the moral authority of socially progressive artists and musicians, and that was consistent with the neoliberal tenet of consumer choice, was to declare the arts niche markets. Fine art and music were paradoxically described by Harper and American neoconservatives as esoteric activities by artistic elites and for an audience of rich aficionados who could afford them, which is ironic considering that tickets for sporting and popular music events are often far more expensive than, for example, those for symphony concerts! See Howard, “Must Music Education Have an Aim?” 256. 48 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 119.

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Ibid. Ibid., 118–119. Ibid. Ibid. David Frum, Dead Right (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 107. Ibid. Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul in 2008 poignantly accused the Harper government of mimicking the politics and policies of American neoconservatives such as George W. Bush. Lacking a social and economic vision of its own, Stephen Harper’s government was accused of reverting to a colonial mentality of deference, this time to the American as opposed to the British Empire. See Saul’s, A Fair Country. For a discussion of this lack of vision and of mimicry of American social, musical, educational values among Canadian music educators, see my own paper “Why Canada Does Not Have National Standards, or Does It?” Eric Alterman, “Who Are They Calling Elitist? Why Do Conservatives Continue to Feel Oppressed by the ‘Liberal Elite’,” Nation, March 27, 2008, www.thenation.com/ article/who-are-they-calling-elitist/ Francis X. Clines, “Spiro T. Agnew, Point Man for Nixon Resigned Vice Presidency, Dies at 77,” New York Times, September 19, 1996, www.nytimes.com/1996/09/19/us/ spiro-t-agnew-point-man-for-nixon-who-resigned-vice-presidency-dies-at-77.html Alterman, “Who Are They Calling Elitist?” Ibid. Alterman quotes from his own book in “Who Are They Calling Elitist?” See Eric Alterman, Why We’re Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America’s Most Important Ideals (New York: Viking Books, 2008). Laura Ingraham, Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the Media are Subverting America (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003). Alterman, “Who Are They Calling Elitist?” Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 120. This book was first published in 1528, the year before his death. According to Joseph Epstein in “The Prince’s Man,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2013, this book subsequently went through 150 editions, www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142412788732384880457860801 0873861682 Ibbitson, Stephen Harper, 16–17. The music performed that evening (and with cellist Yo Yo Ma) was the Beatles’ song “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Between 2009 and 2014, Harper publicly performed at least twenty-nine popular songs on seven occasions, including a state dinner in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for which he strangely sang John Lennon’s “Hey Jude.” See Hopper, “Stephen Harpers’ Infinite Playlist,” http://news.na tionalpost.com.news/canada/canadianpolitics/Stephen-harpers-infinite-playlist The critic of Harper’s music-making to whom I am referring is John Higney, a graduate of my own institution and author of the unpublished paper “Mixing Pop and Politics: Stephen Harper’s Musical Amateurism as Personal Branding.” Higney was quoted by Daro in “With a Little Help from the Piano,” para. 8. Regrettably, and despite many attempts, I was unable to locate Higney. Ibbitson, Stephen Harper, 252–274. This is Chapter 13. Ibid., 253. Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 53. Howard, “Must Music Education Have an Aim?” 254. The words “in the Age of the New Authoritarianism” in the subheading to this section are from Henry Giroux’s, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). Saul Bellow, “Reflections on Alexis de Tocqueville: A Seminar at the University of Chicago,” in Saul Bellow: There is Simply Too Much to Think About, edited by Benjamin Taylor (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 331. This short article was first published in 1984.

Conservative disdain for music and the arts

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90

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Howard, “Must Music Education Have an Aim?” 254. Dewey, Art As Experience, 348. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Simon & Brown, 2011), 196. Dewey, Art As Experience, 275. The words “the actual and the possible” from the previous sentence are borrowed from Thomas Turino’s Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 16. Dewey, Art As Experience, 345–346. Ibid. Margaret Atwood, “Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale,” Guardian, January 20, 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/20/handmaids-tale-margaret-atwood Ibid. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 171. Westbrook refers readers to Dewey’s classic book Democracy and Education, 215–226. As Dewey said in the latter book, “The assistance which may be given by history to a more sympathetic understanding of the present situation in which individuals share is a permanent and constructive moral asset” (120). Westbrook’s source for this quotation is Dewey’s “The Moral Significance of the Common School Studies,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 4, 1899–1924, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 208. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 194, 120. Dewey, Art As Experience, 266. Turino expressed this point in Music as Social Life thusly, “if we grasp how discourses function to construct our realities, then they gain a new freedom to shape our habits and visions of the world” (231). The term “critical synthetic thinking” is Turino’s (xv). G. A. Olson, “History, Praxis, and Change: Paulo Freire and the Politics of Literacy,” Journal of Advanced Composition 12, no. 11 (1992): 9. Dewey admonished teachers in Experience and Education (London: Collier Books, 1969) that it would be folly were they and their pupils to ignore the past because “bound to result in adoption of superficial measures which in the end will only render existing problems more acute” (77). Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, 177. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 195. Turino, Music as Social Life, 231. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking, 196. Like Dewey, the late Philosopher Ronald Dworkin railed against this delimiting of curriculum and teacher practice in his 2006 book Is Democracy Possible Here? arguing that children and youth needed to be introduced in schools to “the most contentious political controversies of the day” so they could find themselves and have some intellectual and moral foundation for their own future decision-making (148–149). Elliott, “Curriculum as Professional Action,” 166. Frum, Dead Right, 202. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking, 196. Westheimer says something very similar in his chapter “What Did You Learn in School Today?” stating that “Music education … is, perhaps, as threatening as some neoliberal reformers perceive it to be. Indeed, music education holds the possibility for a powerful partnership with all those educators who view education as a profoundly human and liberatory endeavor” (108).

5 THE DEFEAT OF THE SCHOOLS

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. George Orwell, 1984

Addressing an audience of American mathematics teachers in 1939, British expatriate, educational psychologist, and sometime progressive music educator James Mursell (1893–1963) spoke of “the defeat of the schools,” referring to an abundance of empirical evidence showing that a large majority of children, and many university students, were failing to acquire mastery of subject matter.1 This was a general educational problem and not confined to mathematics instruction and learning. The origins of this problem were multitudinous and complex, but its primary roots lay in the organization and presentation of curriculum and pedagogy as standardized and thus predetermined, inflexible, and divorced from students’ everyday experience and personal interests. Mursell might have been speaking of today’s politicians, policy makers, and professional teaching associations as he attacked the notion that “the way to get children to learn more in school is a return to the good old days of high pressure and rigid requirements,” including national standards and standardized curricula and testing.2 Much of the blame for this lack of mastery of subject matter was placed on tradition. Children could only assimilate “a small fraction of human culture,” which necessitated that teachers had to be selective in what was included in the curriculum, in what order, and at what age.3 The problem was thus essentially one of selection. Policy makers, curriculum writers, and teachers required some basis for their decisions and more often than not they were made “on the basis of nothing more intelligent or reassuring than long tradition,” which had “a sort of independent life of its own” and was “highly resistant to change.”4 Among Mursell’s criticisms of American education was that, owing to force of long habit, the people making those decisions seldom took into account the kinds of children involved. Even when teachers were successful in

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implanting course material into children’s minds, that information or knowledge was seldom transferable to other subjects or areas of everyday life and work. Mursell regarded this lack of transfer as an indictment of current teaching practices and a sign of the defeat of the schools. “Transfer of training,” he admonished his listeners and readers, “ought to take place. Its failure to do [so] is a reproach to teaching.”5 Although not explicitly stated in his short paper, the implication was that transfer of learning should be the primary aim of all education, as mastery of subject matter alone, “as an end in itself,” was hardly going to prepare them to achieve the levels of synthesis of experience required to think critically and creatively in pursuit of solutions to complex problems in different, and often overlapping, situations. Rather the opposite. Continued reliance on overly narrow and deterministic curricula and methods was likely to stifle personal agency, creativity, and growth by provoking in students a passive aggressive response under the guise of docility “through which the attacking forces of education cannot break.”6 “The human mind,” Mursell continued, is not naturally docile. It is capable of amazing feats of resistance and rejection, beneath a tame and dutiful exterior. It assimilates into its life and makes its own only those things which, for some genuine reason, seem to matter [italics mine]. Everything else stays on the surface and soon evaporates.7 The deeper root of this problem of lack of student success in learning was that children were expected to learn under excessive duress, which was “contrary to all natural tendency.”8 Children were naturally curious and motivated to work when they had an “authentic sense of the importance and value of the things they learn,” but predetermined and rigid curricula and pedagogical methods stifled that tendency.9 This was not to say that educational officials and teachers should necessarily always give children what they wanted, rather that they should be introduced to material and ideas that really mattered in the here and now while being permitted to pursue their own lines of inquiry and analysis. Mursell’s proposed antidote to the defeat of the schools was to “abandon the idée fixe” of standardized curriculum and pedagogy so that teachers were free to introduce “portions and aspects of subject matter” according to individual students’ needs and interests.10 “They should not be doomed to keeping a rigid lock step, or to covering a predetermined area.”11 Flexibility was the watchword, and above all in “what [and when] we ask them to master.”12 Not all children required the same curriculum content. Nor should that content necessarily be “delivered” to them systematically and sequentially, and at the same time, as that assumed a universal child nature that ignored important individual, social, cultural, and other differences (e.g., age, gender, etc.). This notion of the necessity of curriculum being organized and presented systematically and sequentially remains a persistent feature in teacher education today. This is doubtless owing to the lingering effects of Ralph Tyler’s influential rationale for curriculum and instruction based on the natural sciences that provided a

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foundation for teacher education throughout most of the latter half of the twentieth century. Tyler’s rational, which was based on positivist and modernist assumptions about the nature of knowledge, was intended by educational authorities as means of “controlling teachers [and their pupils] through the imposition of [predetermined] curriculum” designed along scientific lines and presented to children in a linear and hierarchical fashion. The emphasis was on “curriculum implementation” and assessment over children’s experience.13 Somewhat similarly, the authors of a 2014 draft copy of the College Music Society Report of the Task Force on the Undergraduate Music Major recommend that a new and broader undergraduate curriculum be based on a “foundation of systematic improvisation and composition” rather than on performance.14 This is in part in recognition of the enormous and historical impact of African music and musicians on music globally, and particularly on American jazz and popular music. Nothing is said, however, about why, let alone how, improvisation should be taught systematically. Nor do the report’s writers appear to realize that teaching improvisation this way might be a form of cultural imposition and distortion because it is antithetical to the African and early jazz experience, not to mention to the experience of children. Mursell thought schools would be far more effective in meeting the educational and social needs of children if those institutions and programs were “so organized that it will become possible to choose for a given individual or a given group at a given time those elements of culture which will indeed provide nourishment.”15 Flexibility was the key. Finally, Mursell critiqued the teaching of mathematics and other subjects as abstract knowledge and skills, that is, for their internal logics or structural principles alone, because this renders learning a drudgery for most children. Education should, from the very beginning of schooling, be conceived and taught to provide children with the intellectual tools needed to make sense of, to act upon, and to vivify present lived experience rather than as preparation for some far off and imaginary future career. To quote Mursell once again, children learn mathematics and other disciplines by actually using them, “in no matter how haphazard and fumbling a fashion, upon problems which we really want to solve.… Let us handle our subject matter as something which is alive, and its logic will take care of itself.”16 Responding to the anticipated charge from traditionalists that his suggested liberalization of education would only “prevent pupils from mastering the ‘logic’ of mathematics, or natural science, or social science,” Mursell retorted that “They are not mastering it now! … they are not mastering it precisely because we present it to them as a logic” and thus, from the perspective of most children, not “worthwhile.”17

Educational standardization as global epidemic Today’s teachers, of course, are required to take students’ differing learning styles into account in the classroom, but the majority of the latter are still expected to learn much the same curriculum content, in the same order, and at the same

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pace. In the United States especially, and owing to a long obsession with national educational standards and standardized testing, and often a lack of educational resources, it would be difficult for teachers to do otherwise. Unlike in Finnish classrooms which feature several teachers and teacher assistants working collaboratively to help individuals and groups of students with “highly varied educational and linguistic abilities,” American teachers are for the most part on their own, with perhaps the occasional teacher assistant for children with educational exceptionalities.18 Like Mursell, the Finns recognize the deleterious effects of duress and excessive stress on learning, believing that schools are for life rather than the other way around. The emphasis is as much on socialization as it is on achievement, and standardized testing is kept to a minimum. Finnish teachers are also held in high esteem and are allowed considerable freedom and flexibility in curriculum content and pedagogy. And yet by almost any measure, and including standardized testing, the Finnish school system outperforms the world in enhancing social mobility among children, despite sometimes having deprived or different social and cultural backgrounds. Perhaps most significantly of all for present purposes, the Finns appear to realize that the neoliberal obsession with standards and “uniform assessment tools for teaching and learning” is antithetical to education.19 Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg describes this obsession as a global epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus. It travels with pundits, media, and politicians. Education systems borrow policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less.20 Standardized curricula and testing have long been a part of western education, but they received renewed impetus and importance—even centrality as the primary measure of educational success and teacher accountability—in state schools and universities with the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic and now political discourse in the world after Margaret Thatcher’s election to high office in 1979, followed by Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1981. Readers may recall from the previous chapters that neoliberals conceive of education in primarily economic terms and it is dependent on the vagaries of the market. Schools are conceived as factories operating in much the same way as automobile plants and requiring objective measures of quality control, hence the interest in “narrow curriculum goals, accountability measures, standardized testing, and … sameness” that has reduced education to “the cold, stark pursuit of information and skills without context and without social meaning.”21 This was what Mursell meant when arguing that overly rigid and fixed curricula and methods rendered education worthless in the eyes and ears of children because it lacked social meaning! Moreover, and as also suggested in Chapter 1, when education is equated with job training, it will likely contribute to their infantilization by keeping them in a state of ignorance of their world.22

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In defense of the liberal arts William Deresiewicz expands on this theme in his provocative 2014 book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, warning that Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.23 He makes a strong defense of the liberal arts against the neoliberal takeover of education in the United States and elsewhere by explaining that these subjects are important to the development of democratic citizenship because they teach children and youth how to think and thereby challenge arbitrary authority, whether of the state and its institutions or traditional accounts of history, politics, the arts, or other areas of life. In essence, the liberal arts prepare students to make sound arguments based on evidence, sound reasoning, empathy, and introspection rather than on prejudice and opinion, and with a view to resisting mindless conformity and injustice. In his 2015 article “The Neoliberal Arts,” Deresiewicz blames neoliberalism for a decline of enrolment in the arts and humanities and physical sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, anthropology) as undergraduates choose career paths regarded as most commercially lucrative (e.g., economics, biology, engineering, and computer science).24 The neoliberal conflation of value with money has transformed students’ and their parents’ understanding of what learning means, which is no longer about intellectual curiosity and self-determination—or about living life more fully in the here and now—but about “getting somewhere else.”25 As he continues, within the institutional culture of today’s university, “it is not the humanities that are under attack. It is learning for its own sake, curiosity for its own sake, ideas for their own sake,” and this has undermined the university’s mission to educate the masses in the deeper sense of teaching them how to think and act as conscientious citizens.26 Within the confines of the university, “few people are interested in thinking and learning, students least of all.”27 Lest readers think this a gross exaggeration of the state of academe, Deresiewicz and others (e.g., Côté and Allahar, 2011) point to evidence that the number of hours per day that students devote to study has been declining for some time, while absenteeism has been steadily increasing. Deresiewicz’s most poignant criticism of the state of higher education is that all too many students have no intellectual mission or purpose of their own other than obtaining the technical skills or factual knowledge required for employment. Public universities have adopted a “customer-service mentality” that caters to students wants rather than to their intellectual needs. This sad state of higher education, he contends, is by no means

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restricted to elite American universities such as Yale and Harvard: It is a global and systemic phenomenon. Owing to the diffusion of American-style admission and educational standards of excellence worldwide, universities are now interconnected and remarkably similar in producing “highly intelligent, accomplished twenty-twoyear-olds who have no idea what they want to do with their lives: no sense of purpose and, what is worse, no understanding of how to go about finding one,” hence the title of his book Excellent Sheep.28 Deresiewicz might have been describing my own university in Ontario, Canada, which not too long ago replaced its mission statement proclaiming its commitment to fostering critical thinking with a shallow promise to provide the “best undergraduate experience.” As with the buzzwords “excellence,” “leadership,” and “creativity” prominently displayed on university walls and websites everywhere, the term “best” is not defined. Deresiewicz might also have been describing my own students in an upper-year undergraduate Philosophy of Music Education course. Over the past decade or so, I have noticed an increasing impatience among them for contemplation and discussion of the big ideas driving all education, not just music education, and how they wish to be told precisely what and how to do their assignments.29 There is little interest or tolerance among them for the kind of open-ended conversation involving ambiguity, controversy, and personal risk that is a requisite for the development of their intellectual capacities as individuals. The last thing that all too many want is to stand out from their peers! Students prefer predetermined learning outcomes and highly structured curricula and methodologies because they are impersonal and require less thought. Theirs is a formulaic and simplistic approach to education in which there is always a right and a wrong way to do assignments, just as answers are conceived in black and white terms. As Deresiewicz similarly observed about his own students, if they do visit their professor for additional assistance—which many delay doing until the last possible moment—it is “to find out what they need to do to get a better grade. Very few will seek you out to talk about ideas in an open-ended way.”30 For professors to disagree with or publicly correct individual students’ inaccuracies or mistakes in class discussions or presentations, or to question their opinions, is to insult them. They want validation and not education in the deepest sense of the term. A poor grade is similarly interpreted as an indication of teacher dislike for an individual student rather than a caring assessment of her work and an incentive to do better. Failure or low grades are the teacher’s fault!31 This too might at first glance seem to be an exaggeration, but teachers at all levels are reminded that the outcome-based educational methods and associated measurement tools foisted on universities and schools by government and neoliberal education reformers globally during the past several decades were always intended in significant part to hold them accountable for their students’ work! Student success was “solely the teacher’s responsibility.”32 Teacher competence was to be assessed based on students’ test scores and grades. After decades of this and similar educational rhetoric, including the related notion of the “value added

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teacher” who could singlehandedly raise students’ standardized test scores, it is no wonder that fewer of today’s students realize they are ultimately responsible for their own learning and are not entitled to an automatic grade of “A.” Further evidence of what amounts to a culture of educational entitlement in universities is found in my students’ critical papers on topics of their own choice, for which they are required to compose a first draft for editorial assistance before final submission. It almost never occurs to them when provided with editorial assistance that they should continue honing their papers through further careful thought and editing. They simply make any suggested grammatical or other corrections for their second and final draft and resubmit, which is to naively fail to realize the complexity and difficulty of researching, thinking, and writing, not to mention their responsibility for learning and personal improvement, including of their grammar! Although sometimes opinionated, few students are sufficiently curious or willing to invest the time and energy needed to test and thereby warrant those opinions. They are essentially passive about their own writing and education. Despite what Mursell said about the importance of teachers allowing students the freedom to choose their own topics for exploration and analysis, they seldom allow themselves sufficient time before course deadlines to find, review, and digest research or other literature so that they can develop greater breadth and depth of knowledge in support of their own arguments. Some have difficulty finding educational or other social problems that matter to them at all! Probably many would prefer to continue living in a state of “innocent unconsciousness,” oblivious to the social, cultural, and political aspects and implications of music and music education.33 Deresiewicz attributes this intellectual passivity and helplessness among undergraduates (and among high school students) to a contradiction in neoliberalism between the rhetoric of freedom and individual choice on the one hand and the culture of the market on the other. For while the former is linked in neoliberal discourse to consumer choice, the latter is exceptionally good at inculcating a sense of helplessness. So much of the language around college today, and so much of the negative response to my suggestion that students ought to worry less about pursuing wealth and more about constructing a sense of purpose for themselves, presumes that young people are passive objects of economic forces. That they have no agency, no options.34 Indeed, university students, he says, are seldom provided opportunities to question and reflect about themselves and the world. This is probably one of the primary reasons why my own students typically have few questions of substance, as my course is the first in their educational experience in which they are expected to think critically about their profession and its problems in any sustained way. This lack of student engagement in academic classes is cause for concern, for as Deresiewicz says, “the students determine the level of classroom discussion and of instruction generally.”35 Despite my own frequent reminders to them that they are

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expected to play important roles in shaping the content and intellectual tenor of our classes, students persist in the belief that the teacher bears sole responsibility for their education and wait for information to be delivered to them. All too many are content to do as little as possible, and are too busy with social or other activities,36 and so they fail to realize that education, personal autonomy, and conscientious citizenship are personal achievements demanding hard work and involving an element of personal risk because requiring an openness to criticism. Thankfully, not all students or classes are disengaged. Nor for the reasons already provided (e.g., lack of opportunities for student questioning and critical reflection throughout much of their education, coupled with a virtual neoliberal educational monopoly on what is of value to society) are students entirely responsible for their plight. Part of the problem with lack of work in academic courses by music education majors is that performance takes precedence in university schools of music with the result that most students, including music education majors, are inordinately busy with rehearsals and concerts. Nevertheless, performance faculty at my own institution similarly complain that not enough students take their practicing seriously and are ill-prepared for lessons and rehearsals. Their students, too, can be overly sensitive to criticism, viewing it as a personal attack rather than as “honest feedback” that is essential to learning, and are reluctant to change.37 Deresiewicz attributes this lack of work ethic and over-sensitivity to criticism and consequent intellectual intransigence among undergraduates to the fact that they have been “raised under a regime of positive reinforcement” that has instilled in them a sense of self-esteem based on the illusion of their own perfection, which has not prepared them to “handle criticism.”38 Moreover, many professors are reluctant to challenge students’ in their complacency with respect to work ethic and expectations for undeservedly high grades, tacitly entering into a “mutual nonaggression pact” with them in return for higher teaching evaluations—often the sole measure of teacher effectiveness—“which notoriously correlate with grades.”39 This may be especially the case with part-time contract faculty whose annual employment renewal depends on student evaluations.

A new and unholy alliance James Côté and Anton Allahar, in Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (2011), characterize this collusion of school and university teachers in dispensing high grades to students regardless of amount and quality of work as a form of “institutional enabling” of student disengagement that is endemic in education today.40 Citing an abundance of research examining contributing factors to student disengagement in universities, they conclude that the university grading system actually discourages student effort by rewarding poor behavior. “After all, why would someone try harder in their courses when high grades are so easily obtained?”41 Much of the responsibility for the customer-service mentality and institutional enabling thereof in public universities lies with government and corporations for meddling in university

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administration and curricular affairs (such as the aforementioned learning outcomes that many faculty regard as an infringement on their academic freedoms) in ways that undermine the original mission of the liberal arts by reducing them to vocational and technocratic training. As noted earlier, much of the impetus for this kind and level of government intrusion into university affairs began in the early 1980s with Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal dictum that state schools and universities should be run like corporations. After almost half a century of relentless neoliberal propaganda to that effect, many governments worldwide have bought into the neoliberal ideological directive and practice of making dwindling public funding dependent on student enrolment and faculty and institutional rankings, which has forced public universities to reinvent and market themselves as “credentialing services” for the masses in order to attract and retain more students.42 The result is that public universities are now locked in a rat race and corresponding climate of permanent uncertainty and insecurity through regional, national, and global competition for rankings and “bums on seats” that has made it professionally daunting—because administration and also many colleagues portray this brave new world as only natural, right, and true rather than as a political imposition—for individual faculty to resist further erosion of their academic prerogatives and freedoms by administrators who are essentially managing their institutions at the behest of government and international corporate interests.43 As Côté and Allahar explain, confronted by governments (and their minion researchers) who believe that all investments in educational systems constitute “capital investments” … university administrators find themselves having to speak this same language as they captain universities that have themselves evolved into corporations where the logic of capital investments prevails.44 Although technically accountable to faculty, these captains of higher education (and school principals) now view themselves as more accountable to politicians and educational bureaucrats “who think in terms of (misguided) economic theory” and are too “detached from the realities of the contemporary classroom” to notice the mission drift of their institutions “from providing a rigorous liberal education to a watered-down system that attempts, but fails, to emulate vocational training.”45 There is in the words of British scholar Thomas Doherty, a new and unholy alliance between economics and management, such that the university as an institution exists primarily for the growth of financial turnover, for the circulation of money (with no specific purpose beyond itself), and for the management of all that governs that circulation.46 For those who still doubt that this neoliberal takeover of public education has, and will continue to have, deleterious effects on society, Deresiewicz observes that what is at stake is nothing less than the loss of the social category of youth, and

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with it an historical and abundant source of creativity and inspiration to create new worlds. The concept of “youth,” he relates, is a modernist invention that arose following the turbulence of the early nineteenth century and resulting democratization of Europe as a special time set aside from childhood and adulthood to question and “think about the world as it existed, and the world you wanted to make.”47 As Deresiewicz continues, “Modernity understood itself as a condition of constant flux, which is why the historical mission of youth in every generation was to imagine a way forward to a different state.”48 Neoliberals instead preach the end of history, contending that society has reached “a steady-state condition of free-market capitalism that will go on replicating itself forever.”49 As already suggested above, this is an essentially utilitarian and self-serving view of human agency and creativity that is bounded by market forces and rich entrepreneurs in which citizenship is conceived in terms of lifestyle choices, and not as the creation of citizens who might use music or the other arts and knowledge of history and philosophy to attempt to change their world for the greater good, or to at least trouble current policy and practice. We hear much talk from neoliberals and corporate leaders of the need for creativity, but to the neoliberal mind and socalled creative class, it is “not about becoming an artist. No one wants you to become an artist. It’s about devising ‘innovative’ products, services, and techniques—‘solutions’ which imply that you already know the problem.”50 Creativity, in short, is synonymous with “design” of predetermined products and, as with the neoliberal conception of leadership, restricted to “technological or technocratic change” within market systems which preclude the possibility of fundamental change.51 Within this utilitarian economic and political framework for society and the world, there is no need or desire for the fostering of youth who might challenge the status quo, resulting in the reduction of that idea to “nothing more than a preliminary form of adulthood, and the quiet desperation of middle age has been imported backward into adolescence.”52 It is thus no wonder universities are experiencing a tidal wave of mental health problems among undergraduates as they encounter yet two more contradictions in neoliberal education reform: first, that students should be trained for future lucrative employment, even though many, if not most, will for the foreseeable future likely be condemned to precarious work, regardless of education; and, second, that free-market capitalism is by definition inherently unstable, and thus, unless students at all levels are encouraged to question the status quo while envisioning new possibilities to create more equitable societies, they will be condemned to lives of permanent financial, social, and even military instability. Nor are these contradictions restricted to youth, for as Deresiewicz and other scholars warn, in neoliberal education reform, children, too, are increasingly conceived as “miniature adults, chasing endlessly for rank and status.”53 Deresiewicz is by no means alone in his condemnation of the neoliberal takeover of education. Many scholars in the arts and humanities have similarly complained that overly narrow and rigid curricula stifle imagination and creativity owing to an over-emphasis on competition and conformity, both of which are

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signs of a lack of educational vision. To extend the metaphor of the school or university as automotive factory, factory workers are typically not expected to be creative, rather the opposite. Like the ancient Greek mythological character Sisyphus condemned to roll a large boulder up a hill for eternity, they are expected to endlessly reproduce their actions to ensure quality control and educational efficiency. Standardization is the enemy of creativity, but as Westheimer explains, this observation works both ways. Creativity and imagination are in the profoundest sense the antitheses, and thus the enemies, of standardization because “powerful counter-forces to the dull and the dreary, worthy adversaries against uniformity and conformity” while reminding us that education is rightly conceived as a “richly human enterprise, built not on disconnected and disembodied facts but on the language of freedom, beauty, art, poetry, and music.”54 Those same subjects, and the arts and humanities generally, many of which have been experiencing a decline in university applications in recent years, are also those in which, if properly taught, children and youth learn to grapple with “ambiguity and conflict” while being educated in their humanity.55 Westheimer, following John Dewey and Maxine Greene long before him, links this with the development of thoughtful, imaginative, and caring citizens who can participate in the shaping of the nation and the world through its politics. As Deresiewicz concludes, “If there was ever a time that we needed young people to imagine a different world, that time is now.”56

Notes 1 James L. Mursell, “The Defeat of the Schools,” Atlantic Monthly, 163, no. 3 (1939): 353–361, www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95dec/chilearn/murde.htm 2 Ibid., para. 43. 3 Ibid., para. 34 4 Ibid., para. 35. 5 Ibid., para. 30. 6 Ibid., para. 33. 7 Ibid., para. 37. 8 Ibid., para. 38. 9 Ibid., para. 37. 10 Ibid., paras. 39, 40. 11 Ibid., para. 40. 12 Ibid. 13 Betty Hanley and Janet Montgomery, “Contemporary Curriculum Practices and Their Theoretical Bases,” in The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning, edited by Richard Colwell and Carol Richardson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 116. 14 Shehan Campbell, “Transforming Music Study from Its Foundations,” 2. 15 Mursell, “Defeat of the Schools,” para. 41. 16 Ibid., para. 42. 17 Ibid. 18 Doug Saunders, “Social Climber: Finland Has Remade Its Education System, Helping Kids Like Lara Osman—Born to Poor, Immigrant Parents—Grow Up to Be Middle-Class Success Stories,” Globe and Mail, April 23, 2016, p. F1. 19 Westheimer, “What Did You Learn in School Today,” 111.

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20 Pasi Sahlberg (blog); How GERM is Infecting Schools Around the World. Pasisahlberg.com, September 30, 2012, https://pasisahlberg.com/text-test/ 21 Westheimer, “What Did You Learn in School Today?” 112 22 William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), 85. 23 Ibid., 79. 24 William Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold Its Soul to the Market,” Harper’s Magazine, 331, no. 8 (2015): 25–32, https://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/theneoliberal-arts/ 25 Ibid., para. 33. See also his book Excellent Sheep, 25. 26 Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts,” para. 13. 27 Ibid., para. 29. 28 Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 25. 29 Richard J. Colwell, “Pride and Professionalism in Music Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, edited by Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch, 607–611 (London: Oxford University Press, 2012). 30 Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts,” (para. 33). Several years ago, when queried by me about their hesitancy to engage in classroom discussion, I learned that many of my students were afraid of being told they were wrong. This is something that warrants research in the field of education, as much of what is most important to us is learned through experimentation and failure. This has obvious implications for music teaching and learning in schools, where music methods such as Kodály’s are designed to minimize or eliminate the possibility of failure. 31 Tom Nichols, “The Death of Expertise,” Federalist, January 17, 2014, http://thefedera list.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise Nichols is a professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College. 32 Gretchen Schwarz and Lee Ann Cavener, “Outcome-Based Education and Curriculum Change: Advocacy, Practice, and Critique,” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 9, no. 4 (1994): 329. 33 Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 85. 34 Deresiewicz, “Neoliberal Arts,” para. 41. 35 Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 192. 36 James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar, Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 37 Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 65. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 64. 40 Côté and Allahar, Lowering Higher Education, 82. 41 Ibid., 144. 42 Ibid., 64. 43 As explained in an unpublished document prepared by the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents (OCAV) entitled Guidelines for University Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations, “The globalization of higher education has led to the need to be able to compare and contrast the variety of qualifications granted by academic institutions for credit transfer, graduate study preparation, and professional qualification.” The goal is to find means of measuring academic equivalencies and to “evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of all [italics mine] aspects of instruction” (2005, www.cou.on.ca/reports/ guidelines-for-university-undergraduate-degree-level-expectations/). Côté and Allahar are by no means the only scholars to complain about the corporatization of higher education. Contributors to the book Zombies in the Academy eds. Andrew Whelan, Ruth Walker, and Christopher Moore (Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2013) made similar arguments. 44 Côté and Allahar, Lowering Higher Education, 58. 45 Ibid., 59.

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46 Thomas Doherty, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Warwick, quoted in an editorial in the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Bulletin, 63, no. 4 (April 2016): 1. 47 Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts,” para. 18. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., para. 37. 51 Ibid., para. 38. A classic illustration of how neoliberals equate creativity with design is found in the National Post newspaper chain in Canada. As stated in an advertisement in one of its many subsidiary local newspapers, “Creativity is the thread that runs through the Post and everyone—from reporters, to editors and producers, to designers—is rooted in the paper’s commitment to visual storytelling.” Note that the term creativity applies only to the visual design elements and not the creation of novel reportage and story writing. London Free Press, April 20, 2016, p. NP6. 52 Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts,” para. 20. 53 Ibid. 54 Westheimer, “What Did You Learn in School Today?” 112. 55 Ibid. Estelle Jorgensen wrote more than a decade ago that “educational philosophy and history … have fallen on particularly hard times. As the prophets and seers have been displaced by the empirical researchers and social scientists, there has been a declining regard for the long and distinguished narratives of education and for the critical insights that would help guard the profession against repeating past mistakes and making illconceived plans.” See her book Transforming Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), x. 56 Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts,” para. 38.

6 I YAM WHAT I YAM

Truth, justice, and the American way. Superman Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

The famous words “I Yam What I Yam” spoken by cartoon character Popeye the Sailor were first seen and heard in movie theaters in 1933 as the title and opening tune of a long series of cartoons by Elzie Segar released by Paramount Pictures between that year and 1957. The complete line of the song was “I Yam What I Yam, and that’s All What I Am.” This might seem circular and therefore senseless, but in the original comic strip in which Popeye was first introduced to the public in 1929 he was correcting other characters who had mistaken him for a cowboy or everyday hooligan. His was initially a case of mistaken identity.1 Popeye’s lyrics are in several ways emblematic of contemporary problems and challenges with the proliferation of claims with respect to gender and other forms of identity as people and their institutions, including their churches, governments, and school systems, struggle to comprehend and adapt to them. The Popeye cartoon is particularly apt for reintroducing the theme of American national cultural politics in this chapter because a composite artistic genre involving the coupling of visual imagery with music and words. Music is often given short shrift in social analyses of media compared to visual imagery and language, possibly because many media critics are literary or political theorists and not musicians. They may lack sufficient background or awareness of how music’s structural properties and qualities contribute to the shaping of peoples’ perceptions and understandings of themselves and their world.

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Henry Giroux, for example, is an influential culture and media critic whose penetrating analyses and critiques of Disney productions, such as the 1987 movie Good Morning, Vietnam, tend to gloss over or underappreciate music’s importance to the popular and critical success of films. The major character of the latter movie was a military disc jockey played by Robin Williams who in the mid-1960s was assigned to Vietnam to entertain the troops but whose programming of unsanctioned popular music and improvisatory on-air verbal style rankled those in command.2 The music was central to the film’s plot and import because symbolizing the burgeoning counterculture among American youth opposed to the growing escalation of the war. That counterculture was inspired and led by folk musicians, such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, who were also involved in the civil rights movement, and later by rock musicians The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, to name only a few.3 As a critical theorist, Giroux was predisposed to focus more on the language and the visual imagery of the film rather than on the music (which he acknowledged in his 1994 book Disturbing Pleasures) and so his readers might not have fully appreciated how the musical sounds themselves, and as much as the lyrics, constitute forms of personal and social criticism and resistance because expressions of morals, values, and sensibilities that differed from, and were in many cases intended as deliberate criticism of, those in authority.

Music education as a forensics of design history As Good Morning, Vietnam illustrates, music can help change society for the better, but it is also a reflection of its time and place.4 For that reason, it can serve as a useful educational medium and site for excavating and critically examining historical, social, and moral norms and conventions in which music was implicated that in their own time were simplistically assumed by many to be right and true but that are now viewed as troubling because harmful to some (if not also in the Freirean sense that oppression harms both the victims and the oppressed by depriving both of their humanity) or because based on a foundation of half-truths.5 Participants at the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale made the same point as I am in re-thinking their own field as involving a forensics of design history requiring that architects go beyond “purely aesthetic questions” to take into account how “each country’s design culture” has throughout its history influenced profoundly people’s lives, and sometimes for the worse.6 According to Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, curator of an exhibition at the Venice Biennale, architects have a moral and ethical responsibility to contribute to social justice. This requires that they first come to grips with their profession’s past ethical lapses or failures to address matters relating to “segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural disasters, housing shortages, [and] migration.”7 In short, architects have a moral obligation to reflect on how their “objects and designs” have informed or otherwise impacted “the human experience—even at its lowest.”8 An example of architecture as forensics is provided by scholar Robert Jan Van Pelt, whose research

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shows that the architects and builders of the gas chambers at Auschwitz knew they were “creating a factory of death.”9 Musicians, artists, and teachers, too, have a moral and ethical obligation to reflect on how their own professions’ design products and processes have wielded “enormous and enduring power” in people’s lives through the shaping of their political and other beliefs, often unconsciously.10 Music and its sister arts have throughout human history been sources of political or other inspiration for the masses, but they have equally been employed as tools of manipulation and tyranny. Musicians and music teachers have similarly at times been complicit in oppression, either directly through performance or teaching or indirectly through a politics of denial with respect to their own or the music industry’s contributions to injustice.11 Examples of injustices initiated or perpetuated by individuals and groups from within or on the periphery of the broader music profession abound. Anthropologist Martin Stokes, in “Music and the Global Order,” reviews how the term “world music,” for example, is not as inclusive, equitable, or truly representative of the world’s people and their musics as one might think. Working notions of “the world” in recording companies are the outcome of often complex conflicts and boardroom discussion, of institutional histories connecting those companies to particular parts of the world, and, it would seem, of a certain element of chance.”12 It is an invention by commercial interests. Coined in 1987 by British music marketers to package and sell “already circulating commercial recordings of popular musics from many parts of the world,”13 so-called world music is rife with the usual problems associated with capitalism, including commodity fetishization, deliberate manipulation, inequality, and cultural hegemony and appropriation. As Stokes continues, “World music discourse wraps in a warm language of mutually beneficial, politically benign exchange the exploitation of non-western sounds”14 but “fundamental asymmetries and dependencies in musical exchange have deepened all too evidently.”15 The world music industry promotes a fantasy of success and stardom for those musicians, but even with the advantages of distribution the internet affords the great majority will have difficulty monetarizing their music. As recently as the turn of the present century, western rock and pop musicians, most of whom were men, dominated music markets globally. More is said of this issue of western dominance of music markets shortly in relation to the United States. For now, it is enough to know, as Stokes suggests, there is reason to believe that “the globalization of music cements the hegemony of significant racial and gendered hierarchies in many parts of the world.”16 In addition to the usual structural problems relating to its production and reception (e.g., commodification, performance practice), music, as much as film, literature, painting, and the other arts, has historically contributed to social and cultural distortions of reality and truth by functioning as patriotic or other propaganda, by diverting people’s attention from problems or overwhelming their

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intellectual defenses through spectacle and musical bombast, and by fostering ideologies and stereotypes that may in some cases create or perpetuate distorted understandings of personal, cultural, or national identity among individuals, groups, and even entire nations.17 The Nazis were especially adept at using music as spectacle and propaganda to promote a warped sense of German national identity and destiny, as were the Soviets with their policy of Soviet Socialist Realism, but they were hardly alone among governments and the rich and powerful in using the arts for similar purposes. Indeed, both Dewey and Chomsky contended that if there was a difference between the Soviets and American capitalists with respect to the use of propaganda and other methods of ideological control of society it was that the former were more deliberate.18 Both men charged that an oligarchy of economic elites has historically held sway over the United States’ polity by “creating and entrenching highly selective, reshaped, or completely fabricated memories of the past” into the public mind via its institutions and the media the result of which is that capitalism is worshipped as almost a state religion and regarded as beyond criticism. The “fundamental doctrine” of this capitalist faith, Chomsky continued, and that has long been embedded in American film, music, literature, cartoons, news, and other media, is “that the state is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions, adopting a defensive stance, not an actor in world affairs but only reacting to the crimes of others.”19

Don’t tread on me The Popeye character and cartoon from which the title of this chapter is drawn are public expressions of this naïve belief in the benevolence and innocence of the United States that has long been embedded in the American psyche and national identity. Popeye is a violent “man’s man” and a righteous and vengeful scourge of those who would attack him and his friends and as such is an embodiment of the national emblem of the rattlesnake. Since the time of the Revolution, the image of this creature has been emblazoned on a variety of patriotic and military flags along with the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” The rattlesnake was viewed as symbolic of American patriotic virtue and identity because a creature that never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage … she never wounds “till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her.”20 Popeye is as pure a representation of the myth of American innocence and the fiction of US military forbearance as one is likely to find. The truth of the matter, but that probably many Americans fail to realize, is that “the United States … [is]functionally, if not self-consciously, an empire” that has been almost perpetually at war or embroiled militarily in regional conflicts since the end of World War Two.21 For those many Americans in “imperial denial” of their country’s long

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history of imperialism, militarism, and violence in pursuit of its own economic or other interests, I direct you to novelist and former senator Gore Vidal’s (1925– 2012) formidable list of military operations with their code names, locations, and dates from VJ-Day 1945 to about the turn of the twenty-first century.22 This list, first published in 2002, does not include the plethora of American and allied military actions in the Middle East or elsewhere since 9/11. Nor, of course, does it include reference to the nineteenth century doctrine of Manifest Destiny that was used to justify American expansionism in North America as Indigenous and Spanish lands were flooded with American settlers and then absorbed into the burgeoning American empire.23 Probably relatively few Americans recall their country’s disastrous history of political meddling and frequent military intrusions into Central and South America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.24 As historian Niall Ferguson observes in Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, American politicians justified their expansionism and frequent military interventions in the Southern Hemisphere with the Wilsonian language of democracy and the biblical notion of American exceptionalism, but it was Wall Street and American Big Business that reaped the benefits of those incursions.25 Cornell West is equally critical of the history of the country’s internal politics, including education reform, arguing that The American democratic experiment is unique in human history not because we are God’s chosen people to lead the world, nor because we are always a force for good in the world, but because of our refusal to acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project. We are exceptional because of our denial of the antidemocratic foundation stones of American democracy. No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such selfdeceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history.26 West’s antidote to this state of willful ignorance, at least in education, is to encourage Socratic questioning among students, not so as to trash the country’s history but to help them construct a more inclusive and accurate understanding of their country’s past so no longer incapacitated and politically disfranchised by the “childish belief that America is pure and pristine.”27 This admonition applies equally to the complicity of those musicians, music teachers, and artists of all kinds, or those who have misappropriated their work, in propagandizing this distorted—because one-sided and illusory—notion of American history and identity to children and the public through the power of imagery and symbols.28 Hence my own interest, and that of some other music education academics, in encouraging and helping children and youth to better attend to music’s many historical meanings while exercising an appropriate level of skepticism, and especially with respect to patriotic music and art, lest they be rendered more susceptible to government propaganda. The following analyses of several Popeye cartoons are intended to model how teachers or parents might begin to

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approach this kind of critical analysis so they can help children and youth realize the social, moral, historical, and political dimensions of thought that are necessary to understanding why and how their own present notions of American experience and identity have been influenced by the past.

Scrap the Jap and You’re a sap, Mr. Jap Given this understanding of American history and identity as grounded in the racism, militarism, greed, and violence usually associated with empire building, it is not surprising that the Popeye cartoon series enjoyed great popularity during World War Two, when it served as useful propaganda with the release of cartoons such as Scrap the Jap and You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap in 1942. Both cartoons were overtly racist in deliberately satirizing Japanese physiognomy while underscoring Popeye’s actions with American militarist or patriotic music. Both of those cartoons were banned after the war for the obvious reason that the United States government wished to avoid offending the Japanese lest it provide fodder for domestic communists. During the early Cold War, and continuing to the present day, Japan was needed as a military and cultural buffer to help keep the Chinese and North Korean communists in check. There are several similarities among these and other Popeye cartoons. In I Yam What I Yam, Popeye and his friends are stranded on an island where they are attacked by American Indians whose physiognomy, too, is grossly distorted. And as also happened to the Japanese sailors in Scrap the Jap, Popeye self-righteously proceeds to decimate them with his fists, all set to the sound of celebratory music. Like most cartoons, and movies for that matter, these cartoons could hardly function without music. Virtually all the action scenes are accompanied with music setting the desired emotional tone, connecting scenes for purposes of continuity, establishing appropriate gradations of intensity and speed of action, including degrees of violence, and generally contributing to the illusions of movement and reality through the immediacy of sound. To repeat some of Dewey’s words from Chapter 1 about the power of music, sounds have the power of direct emotional expression.… It is the peculiarity of music, and indeed its glory, that it can take the quality of sense that is the most immediately and intensely practical of all the body organs (since it incites most strongly to impulsive action) [to create] incredibly varied complexities of question, uncertainty, and suspense.29 Whatever “complexities of question, suspense, and uncertainty” that are generated via music and visual imagery in these cartoons, however, are inevitably and simplistically resolved in Popeye’s favor. In short, the music in I Yam What I Am appeals to the emotions while vivifying the experience beyond what is possible with visual imagery or language alone, making the cartoon more potent as propaganda and, in Scrap the Jap especially, as an incitement to military action.

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The music in I Yam What I Yam also communicates Hollywood-style musical conventions referencing negative cultural stereotypes that can be described as deeply racist because, in this particular cartoon, supporting the visual depiction of Indians as “tomahawk-wielding savages thirsty for the white man’s blood” and thus deserving of complete subjection, if not extermination.30 There is no acknowledgement whatsoever in the cartoon that Popeye and his friends have intruded into Indian territory and that the people they encountered might justifiably have been defending themselves as the intruders began to strip the island of its resources. In short, this one simple cartoon neatly encapsulates much of the history of American relations with, and actions against, indigenous peoples while demonstrating a complete lack of self-awareness or reflection, as suggested by the cartoon’s title I Yam What I Yam.

Culture as a mechanism of control The point of this discussion of the Popeye cartoons, and of I Yam What I Yam in particular, is that many generations of Americans have been raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and other media and cultural productions, including cartoons, that were saturated with music—much of it patriotic, sentimental, sensationalist, commercial, or otherwise intentionally manipulative—that was woven into the narrative of their country’s history much of which was itself based on myth, prejudice, and oft times willful ignorance or deliberate distortion of reality and truth. Americans prefer to think of their country as the land of the free, and thus also free from propaganda and manipulation, but they have from the beginning of the Republic been subjected to relentless capitalist propaganda coupled with the romantic myth of their country’s exceptionalism in the world.31 Often tacit or subtle, but seldom questioned, the myths of American exceptionalism, universalism, and moral superiority have long been embedded in the country’s political discourse and mainstream culture and media where they have operated in much the same way that the British nineteenth century novel and fin de siècle symphonic music of William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams sustained the British in their belief in their own national identity and cultural superiority as something to be exported and emulated by the world.32 Indeed, as Ferguson wryly observes in Colossus, the United States is “as exceptional as all the other sixty-nine empires” that existed in the past, which is to say not as exceptional as Americans suppose.33 The two “Anglophone empires” differ profoundly, but they also “have much in common.”34 Even in democratic countries such as the United States and Britain, culture has always been as much a tool of imperialism and dominance and control as the military, politics, education, and economics for the reason that their governments are constrained by the law in their attempts to control how people behave: It is much easier and in the long run more efficient to control what and how they think, preferably from childhood, which is why music and the arts formerly really mattered in the education of very young children as much as in the pacification of

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the colonized. In both cases, the goal was to “entice and attract” them to instill or reinforce prescribed social and cultural values “without force or inducement.”35 European and North American music and art teachers and academics might have long advocated that their subjects be taught for their own sakes, as autonomous domains of experience, but educational authorities welcomed those subjects into schools because seen as useful for inducting children and youth into, or perhaps better, indoctrinating or assimilating them to, desired social values, dispositions, and ways of thinking, including patriotism, reverence for the American Way, and respect for authority.36 One of the more recent and striking examples of this questionable use of music to instill patriotic values into school children was a National Anthem Project initiated in 2005 by the Music Educators National Conference (since renamed the National Association for Music Educators) in collaboration with the US military and business that has been described as the “largest” project in that professional association’s history.37 The project was “widely rejected” by academics because thought to communicate inappropriate messages to children during the second Iraq war at a time when civil liberties at home and abroad were being abrogated.38 The project’s stated purpose was to “revive patriotism by educating Americans about the importance of The Star Spangled Banner—both the flag and the song.”39

The death of reality Interestingly, this and similar uses of music in education have much in common with the previously mentioned exercise of “soft power” in international politics. Ferguson characterizes American soft power as a form of attempted hegemony thought to be more appealing to populations that cannot be swayed by hard power alone (i.e., by military or economic force) and which is accomplished by inundating them with American media and culture, effectively, as happened in Japan after World War Two, Americanizing them. In this age of mass media and the internet, it is desirable that the country be perceived internationally in almost biblical terms as “an enticing new Jerusalem of economic and political liberty,” and the seductive appeal of American arts, media, and culture makes them ideal tools for the global exercise of American soft power, just as they were in the early Cold War when the Superman cartoon character first uttered the famous words “truth, justice, and the American Way.”40 Indeed, as Greg Guba writes, since the early Cold War, the United States government and major American corporations controlling much of the world’s media and wealth have been in the business of “perception management” to shape what the public both at home and abroad think. This has been accomplished in significant part through private-sector ownership of “the so-called marketplace of ideas” resulting in increased commercialization of the news (and virtually everything in our lives, including education) in ways that undermine democracy and personal and national autonomy.41 Of particular concern for present purposes are the reduction of the news to entertainment by the addition of music and the practice of what Guba describes as “deadly omissions.”42

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Writing in 1985, Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business of a growing intrusion of music into the news that stifled thought and discouraged public discourse by lulling audiences into a false sense of consciousness of the state of the world. By contributing to the “dissolution of the lines of demarcation between serious public discourse and entertainment,” music functions to comfort viewers by fostering the illusion that “the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play.”43 It is only when the music stops on rare occasions, such as happened in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that viewers “expect something truly alarming, possibly lifealtering.”44 More specifically, Postman charged that the theme songs and music tags or leitmotifs that he noticed being incorporated into news programming were intended to “maximize entertainment value” by dramatizing stories so as to evoke particular emotional responses.45 Today, and much like in films, music is being inserted into the news immediately before selected stories to signal in advance to viewers how they should feel, influencing their perception of reality by rendering them more accepting of content, which in mainstream news programing is now primarily advertising, and less so the news.46 The danger of this practice to democracy and to personal or national autonomy, Guba continues, is that “when people think and act according to the prescriptions they receive from media,” and when treated as consumers and not citizens, “consciousness of self and one’s relationship with the world can easily be lost.”47 Of the two modes of perception management, music’s intrusion into the news versus “deadly omissions,” however, the latter may be more problematic because a reflection of an American ethnocentrism or “news imperialism” that has left too many of its citizens “cross-culturally handicapped” because ignorant of what is happening elsewhere. The United States is a massive exporter of its culture and media products to the world but imports very little, resulting in a lack of interest in and knowledge of global politics and personal reflection that has “contributed greatly to a persistent jingoism in the handling of fast-breaking foreign political stories, along with unchallenged misinformation and glaringly cynical blackouts.”48 On most days, one is hard pressed to find anything at all in American television news programming about other parts of the world, while citizens of many other countries have the opposite experience. They are “bombarded with the western flavor and bias of imported arts and news,” and especially music, that threaten to overwhelm their indigenous cultures and traditions through American control of international media (including the internet) and that is intended to Americanize, but which is often resented.49 Guba thus rightly characterizes this treatment and marketing of American news to the world as a form of “cultural colonialism” that victimizes people both at home and abroad because inundating those from underdeveloped nations with “western news and mental popcorn” while simplistically presenting them to “US consumers as either hapless peasants or ideological fanatics.”50 Like me, Postman’s concern in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and in his later book Technopoly, was for the deleterious effects of television, and by extension virtually all electronic media and technology, on the minds of children and the public

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generally by dramatizing or trivializing the news with the addition of music, or censoring it through omission or fragmentation thereby misinforming them or rendering whatever information they obtain from those sources “unreal” and not worth questioning or thinking about seriously. Philosopher Andrew Potter takes this criticism of the impact(s) of technology on consciousness and our perceptions of reality even further, arguing in his article “The Death of Reality” that we now live in a technologized world in which, for the first time in history, our primary “mode of existence … is mobile, networked, and virtual” and that this has undermined the very notion of reality.51 Whereas individuals used to “occupy a specific time and place” that shaped their fundamental social, political, and cultural beliefs and values, those beliefs and values are now shaped by virtuality as children and adults are constantly inundated not just with deliberate lies, misinformation, and omissions but also with what Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously described as “bullshit.”52 Frankfurt’s 2005 book On Bullshit presented a philosophical exploration of the scatological term that is relevant to the present discussion on the deleterious effects of media on the minds of children because it was applied to Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential election campaign. Bullshit differs from lying in that, whereas the liar consciously intends to deceive and is thus aware of truth, the bullshitter is indifferent to it. Probably all of us engage in this form of activity from time to time with our friends, when it can be innocuous, but in the hands of skilled politicians or other people in positions of authority and power it can have dire consequences for society. The problem is one of “epistemological carelessness,”53 or sloppiness with respect to the way things are, that Frankfurt regarded “as a greater enemy of truth than lies”54 because fostering a bewildering mix of the two that can sow greater confusion among the public and in the career bullshitter’s own mind. In short, the political bullshitter degrades his own capacity and that of the public to distinguish reality and truth from fiction as he pontificates about things he knows little or nothing about, thereby making “society as a whole more credulous and willing to accept all sorts of irrational beliefs.”55 This was CNN political commentator Fareed Zakaria’s concern expressed in a 2016 television op-ed piece in which he described then presidential candidate Trump as “a bullshit artist” and a threat to the nation, if not to the world.56 As Zakaria explained, the term “bullshit artist” was more appropriate than “liar” when describing Trump’s many public statements about purported matters of fact because, as Frankfurt wrote, bullshitting is “more expansive and independent [than lying], with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the ‘bullshit artist.’”57 The term “bullshit artist” is thus appropriate to our present discussion about the power and uses of music and related arts for purposes of dissimilation, indoctrination, or other forms of manipulation, for as Clancy Martin writes in his review of On Bullshit, whereas Nietzsche “often writes that art is a lie and artists are liars … what he really means is that artists are particularly refined and skillful bullshitters.”58 I read this to mean that musicians and artists are just as prone to engaging in deceit and obfuscation as people in other occupations but are

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sometimes highly trained experts possessing the wherewithal to shape people’s perceptions of reality and truth through the manipulation of symbols and imagery. As Nietzsche wrote about music, “with tones one can seduce people into every error and every truth.”59 This is all the more reason why, in education at all levels, students should be encouraged to attend to the social, moral, and political dimensions and implications of the arts in their lives so they can infer or decipher the intentions of those creating, performing, or otherwise using the arts for their own ends. Musicians and artists can in the Adornian sense afford listeners and viewers greater insight into reality by honing their critical faculties and thereby heightening their consciousness of conditions. Adorno famously quipped in his Philosophy of New Music, first published in 1949, that “New music … has taken all the darkness and guilt of the world on itself.”60 Art can also function as a political tool in pursuit of social justice as a corrective to misinformation and deliberate lies. But the work of artists and musicians all too easily approaches bullshit if distorting or obfuscating truth and people’s perceptions of reality by claiming the arts make it possible for people to literally commune with God (such as was long claimed by many proponents of the “art for art’s sake” argument) or, at the other extreme, are entirely subjective or just entertainment and therefore that “anything goes,” which is to say that “nothing matters”! It was to counter the abovementioned and growing “dissolution of the lines of demarcation between serious public discourse” and entertainment, lies, and other forms of deceit that Postman called for the development of alternative curriculums “to foster a healthy intellectual skepticism” in children as preparation for fullfledged democratic citizenship.61 This was so they would be better prepared to question what was presented to them as truth by doggedly pursuing their own lines of inquiry and not, as Dewey formerly admonished his readers against, gullibly believing everything they see, read, hear, or are told by authority figures.62 In this age of Post-Truth, and more than ever before, it is vital for democracy that children and adults learn to distinguish truth, when discernable, from political and corporate propaganda, disinformation, and bullshit which today is increasingly driven by reactionary populist politics and market forces. This is not to say or imply that we should have no trust whatsoever in our institutions and politicians, or that, as former English Conservative Minister of Education Michael Gove foolishly exhorted the British public in the period leading up the 2016 Brexit referendum, “People in this country have had enough of experts.”63 It is just that we live in a time when populist politicians such as Trump or Boris Johnson in Britain “represent a new stage of post-rational campaigning” and in which the stakes for individual nations and political entities such as the European Union are higher than anything experienced since the Cold War.64 “The costs of giving up on truth,” philosopher Mark Kingwell writes, “are pretty severe.”65 This is something that the Americans and British have hopefully learned from their experiences during the second Iraq war, when one of President George W. Bush’s advisors was overheard saying that the United States government no longer relied on intelligence or evidence to achieve an appropriate level of understanding of “discernable reality.… We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”66

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Given this hubris, it is no surprise to learn from the Chilcot Report in Britain from the Iraq Inquiry Committee (released in early July 2016) that, despite repeated public assurances to the contrary, American and British leaders were impetuous and “woefully and willfully unprepared” for the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion.67 “Misinformation, rhetorical deceit, bogus belief-systems, and plain ignorance are the norm, not the exception, in human affairs,” Kingwell writes, but if we are to have any hope of creating a better world they must be “combatted actively.”68 And I can think of no better place to start combatting prejudice, ignorance, distortions of truth, and outright lies with children and youth than in the arts and mass media, “the fountainhead[s] from which political discourse, beliefs about politics, and consequent actions [and whether good or ill] ultimately spring.”69

Notes 1 See http://popeye.com/history/ 2 See www.allmusic.com/album/good-morning-vietnam-original-soundtrack-mw000198 5790 3 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4498011.stm 4 Girma Negash writes that the arts are not only “reflections of social and political conditions” but are “defined by their spatial-temporal dimensions.” They are also the source of inspiration for political discourse and should therefore be regarded as central to politics and society. See his “Art Invoked: A Mode of Understanding and Shaping the Political,” International Political Science Review, 25, 2 (April 2004): 186. 5 For a somewhat similar argument, see Howard Zinn’s The Politics of History, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press) and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007). 6 Alex Bozikovic, “Giving Structural Integrity to History,” Globe and Mail, May 28, 2016, p. R4. 7 Ibid. These words are by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena and quoted by Bozikovic. 8 Ibid. These are Bozikovic’s words. 9 Ibid. Robert Jan van Pelt, quoted by Bozikovic. 10 David Hebert and Alexandra Kertz-Welzel, eds., Patriotism and Nationalism in Music Education (Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012), 2; Negash, “Art Invoked: A Mode of Understanding and Shaping the Political,” 186. 11 Hebert and Kertz-Welzel, Patriotism and Nationalism in Music Education, 2. 12 Martin Stokes, “Music and the Global Order,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004): 54. 13 Ibid., 52. 14 Ibid., 55. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Kalle Lasn, “Culture Jamming,” in The Consumer Society Reader, edited by Juliet Schor and Douglas B. Holt, 414–432 (New York: The New Press, 2000). Lasn describes spectacle as an instrument of social control (418). 18 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 200. 19 Chomsky, “The Manufacture of Consent,” 132. 20 These words are by an anonymous writer in the Pennsylvania Journal, December 1775, reprinted in www.foundingfathers.info/stories/gadsden.html 21 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), viii.

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22 Gore Vidal, “Black Tuesday,” in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, edited by Jay Parini (New York: Vintage International, 2008), 417–449. For his list of American military operations during the latter half of the last century, see pages 428–449. Noam Chomsky, of course, has been a thorn in the American government’s side with his criticism of American militarism. See, for example, his book Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-911 World: Interviews with David Barsamian (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2005). 23 Ibid. Chomsky shares Jawaharlal Nehru’s belief that “Racism is inherent in imperialism rule” (48). Chomsky reminds his readers of the American “takeover of Texas and around half of Mexico about 150 years ago” (49). Manifest Destiny was also later used to justify the expansion of American political and economic interests globally. 24 Ferguson writes in Colossus that Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that the United States would not tolerate “certain types of government” in Latin America gave rise to “the paradox that was to be a characteristic feature of American foreign policy for a century: the paradox of dictating democracy, of enforcing freedom, of extorting emancipation” (54). 25 Ibid. As Ferguson also writes, “the most damaging allegation against American imperialism” in the 1930s was made by General Smedley D. Butler, “the most decorated marine of his generation,” in declaring that his frequent invasions and military intrusions into Central and South America, and including the Caribbean, served American capitalist, not democratic, interests (58–59). It is important to point out here that neither Ferguson nor I is arguing that the world would necessarily be a better place if the United States were no longer the reigning power. Ferguson contends that the world is better off with the United States as the dominant power because much better than the alternative, which is China! The issues here for this present chapter are American sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy with respect to its political rhetoric and mythologizing. 26 Ibid., 41. 27 Ibid. 28 For example, music was utilized by American troops during the invasion of Panama in the 1980s when American forces used loud music as a weapon to force Panamanian President Manuel Noriega from the Vatican embassy in Panama City and, later, as a mode of torture in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for softening up detainees prior to interrogation. Popular and symphonic music were also both played to American troops in Iraq prior to night-time operations to stoke their blood lust for fighting. 29 Dewey, Art As Experience, 238–239. 30 See http://racerelations.about.com/od/hollywood/a/Five-Common-Native-AmericanStereotypes-In-Film-And-Television.htm 31 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 183. 32 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). Drolet, in American Neoconservatism, explains that American neoconservatives view their country “as the expression of the historical unfolding of a universal morality,” or perhaps better as one that ought to be universal, and the United States as the driving force of a liberal order with it functioning as the “‘indispensible’ decider and enforcer of natural rights over the relativistic normative structure of international society” (183–184). 33 Ferguson, Colossus, 15. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 19. 36 See Hebert and Kertz-Welzel, Patriotism and Nationalism in Music Education. Despite their claims to music’s autonomy as a discipline or domain unto itself and thus worth learning for its own sake, music teachers have always hedged their bets by simultaneously claiming music instruction also develops skills and dispositions useful in the workforce. For a brief discussion of how public policy affects music education, see Hal Abeles’s “Politics, Policy, and Music Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol. 2, edited by Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch, 593–596 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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37 David G. Hebert, “Patriotism and Music Education: An International Overview,” in Patriotism and Nationalism in Music Education, edited by David Hebert and Alexandra Kertz-Welzel (Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012), 7. 38 Ibid., 9. Hebert and I are both indebted to Historian Jere Humphrey for this point. The quote that Hebert uses is from Humphrey’s speech acknowledging acceptance of a Senior Research Award from MENC that was published in the Journal of Research in Music Education, 54 (2006): 183–202. 39 Hebert, “Patriotism and Music Education,” 9. This was a quote from the MENC (now NAfME) website. The United States, of course, is hardly unique in using culture as soft power in both the school and society, and even internationally. Music has long been utilized in Chinese schools to develop filial obedience and, more recently, “soft nationalism” in children, and especially in Hong Kong after the British exodus in 1997. The People’s Republic of China has also for the past several years been increasingly exporting its traditional opera and music internationally to promote a sense of universal Chinese identity and attachment to the homeland among expatriates. See Frank Ching, “The Long Reach of Beijing,” in Globe and Mail, May 9, 2016, p. A11; Wai-Chung Ho and Wing-Wah Law, “The Promotion of Multiple Citizenships in China’s Music Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, edited by Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schmidt, Gary Spruce, and Paul Woodford, 91–106 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 40 Ferguson, Colossus, 20. The words “truth, justice, and the American Way” were first uttered on television in The Adventures of Superman series of 1952–1958, during the early Cold War. See Erik Lundegaard, “Truth, Justice and (fill in the blank),” New York Times, June 6, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/opinion/30lundegaard.html Ironically, one of the two men who originally and jointly created the Superman character, named Joe Shuster, was a Canadian, www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/ superman 41 Greg Guma, “Perception Management: Media & Mass Consciousness in an Age of Misinformation,” in Censored 2008: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006–07, eds. Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, 349–373 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 349. 42 Ibid., 351. See also Douglas B. Holt and Juliet B. Schor, “Do Americans Consume too Much?” in The Consumer Society Reader, edited by Douglas B. Holt and Juliet B. Schor (New York: The New Press, 2000), viii. 43 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 102–103. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. See also Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993). 46 Ben H. Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, 6th ed. (Beacon Press, 2000), quotes advertising executive Chuck Blore as stating that “Advertising is the art of arresting human intelligence just long enough to get money from it.” Quoted by Anup Shah in “Media and Advertising,” www.globalissues.org/article/160/media-and-advertising para. 1. 47 Guma, “Perception Management,” 354. 48 Ibid., 351. 49 Ibid. Holt and Schor, in “Do Americans Consume Too Much?” report that Hillary Clinton expressed her own concern that “the export of American entertainment and consumer products was destroying indigenous cultures” (vii). Ferguson, in Colossus, is more conservative in his own assessment of American dominance of world cinema, stating that “about half of the world’s countries rely principally on the United States to supply their cinemas with films” (21). I would think that proportion has increased now that downloading of movies from companies such as Netflix is so easy and inexpensive. In Latin America, Ferguson also writes, “75 percent of television programs are USmade” (ibid.). 50 Guma, Perception Management, 354.

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51 Andrew Potter, “The Death of Reality,” National Post, July 22, 2016. Potter’s point is that virtuality has resulted in a nihilistic and nearly universal consumer culture “without regard for economic status, ideological conviction, and social or political development” (A8). 52 Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Donald Trump’s accusations that the Democrats were attempting to steal the presidential election in November 2016 by rigging electronic voting machines, among other things, presents a classic case of how public confidence might be undermined in a virtual world. One of trump’s informal advisors warned that election results collected via electronic voting machines might be manipulated and that “We are now living in a fake reality of constructed data and phony polls.” Maggie Haberman and Matt Flegenheimer, “Trump’s New Tactic—Discredit Voting Process,” Globe and Mail, August 22, 2016, p. A11. 53 Clancy W. Martin, “Review of On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt,” in Ethics 116, no. 2 (January 2006): 416, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/498546 54 Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 61, see also Martin’s “Review of On Bullshit,” 417. Frankfurt’s conception of bullshit as differing from lying has received its share of criticism, but as Marlin emphasises in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, “there are many ways of misleading people without actually lying,” for example, by use of equivocal language, deliberate omission or ignoring of information, and reliance on presupposition and accusations of guilt by association for purposes of misdirection (164–166). 55 Jeet Heer, “Donald Trump Is Not a Liar, He’s Something Worse: A Bullshit Artist,” New Republic, December 1, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donaldtrump-not-liar 56 Christina Manduley, “Fareed’s Take: Why I Called Trump a BS Artist,” CNN, August 5, 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/opinions/donald-trump-bs-artist-fareed-take/index. html Heer makes much the same argument in “Donald Trump Is Not a Liar.” 57 Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 53, quoted in Martin, “Review of On Bullshit,” 419. 58 Martin, “Review of On Bullshit,” 419. 59 Bruce Ellis Benson, “Nietzsche’s Musical Askesis for Resisting Decadence,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 34 (Autumn 2007): 31, www.jstor.org/stable/20717912 Benson sites the source GS 106 for this quotation. 60 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, edited and translated by Robert HullotKentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 102. 61 Wolfgang Saxon, “Neil Postman, 72, Mass Media Critic, Dies,” New York Times, October 9, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/10/09/obituaries/09POST.html?pagewanted=print 62 See Dewey, “Education for a Changing Social Order.” 63 Elizabeth Renzetti, “Conspiracy Theorists, Rejoice: Brexit Proves You Don’t Need the Truth to Win,” Globe and Mail, June 25, 2016, p. A2. 64 Mark Kingwell, “Who Needs Truth in This Post-Factual World,” Globe and Mail, June 18, 2016, www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/who-needs-the-truth-in-this-post-factualworld/article30507031/ 65 Ibid. 66 Ferguson, Colossus, vii. 67 See www.cbc.ca/news/world/chilcot-report-1.3666502 68 Kingwell, “Who Needs the Truth?” www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/who-needsthe-truth-in-this-post-factual-world/article30507031/ 69 Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Perceptions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), no page provided, quoted by Negash in “Art Invoked” (186).

7 ON THE END OF HISTORY AND THE GLOBAL DECLINE OF MUSIC EDUCATION?

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. George Orwell, Why I Write

Near the conclusion of the previous chapter, I commented briefly on the rise of politicians Donald Trump in the United States and Boris Johnson in England as epitomizing the current era of Post-Truth in which individuals, and including some powerful (and sometimes very wealthy and socially privileged) populist leaders, appear to have little or no regard for truth, tradition, authority, or experts as they pander to the public. Readers will recall that CNN television host Fareed Zakaria characterized Trump as a “bullshit artist.” As described by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, these were highly skilled and motivated individuals who playfully and creatively waxed expansively about things about which they knew little because not constrained by truth, evidence, rules of order or, for that matter, falsehood. The bullshit artist instead sought to create a smokescreen to mask his or her own agenda and intentions from others. As Frankfurt continued, The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. His only indispensable characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.1

Who in the world is Donald Trump? Despite the immense amount of publicity and time afforded Trump by the media that allowed him to transform the Presidential race and Presidency into virtual reality shows, he remains an enigma to Americans, even among those whose who voted for him.2 “More than any other major figure in modern presidential

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politics,” wrote political commentators Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish in their 2016 book Trump Revealed, he is “allergic to ideology.”3 The book’s title is misleading, for Trump had nothing to say in his interviews with its authors about his core convictions, or even whether he has any at all beyond his business experience and tactics and a vague statement of the necessity of his being pragmatic in his dealings.4 Known for his “braggadocio, self-promotion … bombast,” and disparagement of experts and elites, he is not one whom many of us would credit with the qualities of self-reflection and discretion.5 In his 2015 book Crippled America, he echoed the cartoon character Popeye in asserting that “I am what I am.”6 This lack of personal reflection, however, might only be a façade. Lawyer Stanley Fish raises the possibility that Trump might be more sophisticated in his speaking style than his critics suppose. By “testifying to a shared experience,” “telling it like it is, just as [he] sees it,” and claiming to “speak from the heart,” he is attempting to foster an illusion of fellowship with the masses.7 As is explained shortly, Frankfurt contended that expressions of sincerity of this sort were also bullshit! Trump is by no means the only politician to avoid talking about his convictions while claiming to be “just an ordinary guy.” Recall from Chapter 4 that former Canadian Prime Minister Harper similarly disparaged experts—including musicians and artists—was tight lipped about his personal beliefs and was accused of engaging in dissimilitude with respect to the extent of his own musical abilities. Harper, too, claimed to be a political pragmatist. Neoliberals and neoconservatives like to think the victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the late 1980s “marked the end of man’s ideological evolution—the end of history” [italics mine].8 Fukuyama, in his 1989 article and later book of the same name, predicted that the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the “inevitable spread of the West’s hedonistic market civilization through globalization” would for the foreseeable future render ideological struggle and revelation of personal beliefs and moral values of politicians and public figures unnecessary.9 Governments everywhere, it seemed, were already abandoning ideology in favor of a nihilistic neoliberal “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems … and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”10 Fukuyama’s questions were, first, would not such a world create demoralized and self-satisfied citizens “with neither striving nor aspiration?” and, second, might not a fear of being contemptible “lead men [sic] to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial ‘first men’ engaged in bloody prestige battles, albeit this time with modern weapons”?11 Today, it appears that there was some truth to Fukuyama’s predictions, as substantial segments of the American and English populace, and including Trump, simplistically lump politicians together less so in terms of party or ideology as “under such rubrics as ‘Washington,’ ‘Brussels,’ or ‘Wall Street.’”12 American politics became especially toxic during the 2016 Presidential race between Trump and Hillary Clinton as it degenerated into a mud-slinging contest devoid of ideas and mutual respect. Indeed, if Trump was consistent about anything in his messaging to the electorate it was that he is not of the political class or beholden to any party or

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its ideology. Although some conservatives prefer to think of him as a paleo-conservative along the lines of Barry Goldwater or Pat Buchanan, both of whom were known for their inflammatory remarks and stridency, Trump has switched his party allegiance seven times over the course of his career, “including stints as a democrat.”13 An alternative assessment of Trump’s politics might thus be that, like Harper, he is a pragmatist in the Machiavellian and technical sense of doing whatever is necessary to achieve his goals, divorced from moral considerations. Trump’s pragmatism thus has little in common with the philosophical pragmatism of men such as C. S. Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, who shared an “epistemic concern for meaning and truth.”14 The fear among liberals globally is that Trump is one of Fukuyama’s “first men” whose aggressive bluster and talk about “making America great again” and “politics is about war” will, now that he is elected, lead to increased levels of military, political, and economic instability and strife throughout much of the world.15 As is explained next, Trump’s claims to “telling it like it is” and “speaking from the heart” are bullshit because hypocritical owing to his logical inconsistency in claiming personal truths while demonstrating a lack of concern for truth generally.16

On truthiness, bullshit, and reality Frankfurt’s book was initially written as an essay in the mid-1980s when the internet was still in its infancy. He was reacting to what was perceived to be an inordinate amount of bullshit in contemporary American culture attributable to anti-realist doctrines that rejected the possibility of objectivity and thereby also the existence of truth and falsity. Frankfurt realized this lack of faith in the possibility of objective truth presented a serious challenge to the social and educational ideal that citizens in a democracy should be politically informed and engaged, as it implied “the lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his [sic] apprehension of reality.”17 As was also explained in the previous chapter, this is particularly the case in today’s world of virtuality in which children and youth (and adults) learn almost everything they know about the world from social and mass media, for better or for worse. The various media in our employ can sometimes be accurate and reliable sources of information, but we should never assume such is the case for the obvious reason that it is tautological to say we are all now constantly inundated via media with endless hype, half-truths, fake news, lies, and bullshit, making it challenging to discern truth from fiction, opinion, deliberate distortion, or obfuscation. It often takes considerable personal discipline and hard work to mine the internet for reliable information that can be reasonably trusted as accurate or true. This is the thrust of Daniel J. Levitin’s new book A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age.18 Political columnist Gwynne Dyer illustrates this problem of how media can warp public perceptions of truth with reference to the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the outcome of which was influenced by a “huge popular over-estimate of the numbers of immigrants” that bred an irrational fear among

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many people, and particularly in rural areas of England. “For years,” Dyer writes, “a big chunk of British media … exaggerated the scale of immigration and its problems” such that people in rural areas, “where immigrants are scarce, … don’t believe the evidence of their own eyes; they believe the media instead.”19 People in the United Kingdom are by no means the only ones to over-estimate the proportions of immigrant groups among their countries’ populations. Americans, for example, apparently believe immigrants constitute 32 percent of their country’s population when the reality is that it is only 13 percent. Muslims are especially over-estimated in their numbers. Whereas “only one percent of Americans are Muslim … Americans believe it is 15 percent,” a level of ignorance that Dyer contends makes Trump’s bullshit “easier to believe.”20 Readers will recall that this, too, was a theme introduced in Chapter 6. Career bullshitters degrade their own capacities for careful thought while rendering the public “more credulous and willing to accept all sorts of irrational beliefs” because too distracted or sloppy in their thinking to question what they are told, because swayed by the bullshitter’s passionate delivery or because wishing it were true.21 Comedian Stephen Colbert satirized this kind of sloppy thinking in his television program in 2005 when he coined the word “truthiness” to describe thought and action governed by emotion while ignoring the facts.22 The word was later defined by the American Dialect Society as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true [italics mine], rather than facts known to be true.”23 If there is a difference between Colbert’s “truthiness” and Frankfurt’s bullshit it is that, whereas the former was intended only as commentary on the America political class, the latter was regarded by Frankfurt as a societal problem. The prevalence of bullshit in society was attributed by him to a loss of confidence in the possibility of truth that prompted a “retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity [italics his].”24 Rather than attempting to arrive at a reasonably accurate understanding of our shared world that is external to the senses—because perhaps it is regarded as futile—the individual turns inward in a quest for self-understanding and identity with the misguided view that it is somehow possible to be true to one’s “own nature,” whatever that is. This might account somewhat for the proliferation of gendered and other identities in contemporary western society as progressively more individuals turn inward and away from the world by “othering” themselves with labels that are unavoidably binary.25 Frankfurt skewered this notion of being “true to oneself”’ by observing, first, that one cannot logically reject the notion of truth with respect to the world while claiming self-truth and, second, that to the extent that we can know ourselves at all it is through our interactions with our constantly changing and often unpredictable worlds. “Our natures,” if such things exist, are thus “elusively insubstantial.… And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself [in the sense of being sincere with respect to attempting to be authentic or ‘true’ to one’s nature, or claiming to be speaking from the heart] is bullshit.”26 Were this pursuit of sincerity only a temporary or passing interest it might do no significant harm to individuals and to society, but

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insomuch as it represents a withdrawal from the world into a personal space, or into virtuality, it is likely to render some people overly susceptible to the kinds of inchoate and salvationist rhetoric and rantings of charismatic or populist leaders such as Trump because dependent on them for their interpretations of reality.27

The Trump Effect Trump is hardly alone in his anti-establishment rhetoric. He is, however, without question one of the most vitriolic and divisive leaders of a growing and now global populist movement among politically disaffected voters who are cynical of career politicians, bankers, experts, and elites of all kinds (including those with higher education degrees). Many of the latter are blamed for the hollowing out of the middle and working classes as a result of neoliberal globalization and free trade agreements and for what populists perceive (as we have seen in all too many cases wrongly) to be a tidal wave of illegal immigration that threatens their countries’ sovereignty and economic security, not to mention their own employment opportunities.28 Trump personifies and encourages this way of thinking among a substantial proportion of the American electorate with his hyperbolic rants that the country’s leaders and its institutions have failed the public. To reiterate the title of one of his most recent books, they have Crippled America.29 It is a nativist and nationalist agenda for the United States that resonates to some extent with many people in England, France, and other European countries who similarly blame the European Union for all they perceive to be wrong with their countries. Hence the success of those in England, a majority of whom are from rural parts of the country, who voted to leave the EU in the recent Brexit referendum. The situation, however, was far worse in the United States, where according to journalist Michael Den Tandt, writing in 2016, “Under Trump’s influence, the GOP has metastasized into an anti-trade, anti-business, parochial, xenophobic, enraged grievance movement that makes England’s Brexit movement look like an act of urbane world citizenship.”30 Most worryingly, and ironically considering the post-election accusations against him of colluding with the Russians, Trump threatened to declare the presidential election rigged against him and his supporters if he lost the election. If carried out, his threat might have further destabilized the nation and world by breeding even greater distrust of the political process and by encouraging some, as had already happened, “to retreat to bigotry. To say whatever they want to whomever they want. To publicly humiliate and violently attack those with whom they disagree.”31 This is now referred to as the “Trump Effect,” a phenomenon that was already witnessed in some American schools shortly after the election as children mimicked Trump’s vitriol and aggressive vocal delivery while singling out immigrant and colored classmates for harassment.32 At the time immediately prior to the 2016 election, Trump’s odds of becoming President were slightly lower than Hillary Clinton’s, who ultimately went down in defeat. But as journalist Margaret Wente warned, even if Trump had lost the election, Trumpism—“the nativist,

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anti-establishment revolt that has swept the United States”—would continue to be a potent force in American politics for the foreseeable future.33

The American education system is failing By now readers may be wondering what the foregoing has to do with education, and with music and art education in particular. The answer is plenty. Among the public institutions Trump maligned in the lead up to the election were the Department of Education and public schools, both of which he claimed had failed the country because relegating American children to 26th place in the world—he did not say which year or according to which criteria or measures he was referring, but presumably it was to the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) standardized tests in literacy, maths, and science, or similar measures— this despite the fact, at least according to him, that the United States spent more per capita on education than any other country.34 There was little acknowledgement in Crippled America of the huge inequities in education or health care funding, or of historical and other factors that might help explain the relatively low ranking of American schools and the lack of social mobility among children compared to, for example, social democratic countries such as Canada and the Scandinavian countries.35 While expostulating that the primary challenge for the country’s education system was to make available “the best education possible … for the most American kids,” he had nothing to say in his book about how those inequities, including ones in education funding, might eventually be redressed. Nor was his conception of “the best education possible” described.36 Later in his book, in a chapter entitled “Lucky to be an American,” it becomes clear he is an ardent believer in the myth of the American Dream, that its citizens are free “to achieve as much as [their] hard work and talent allow.”37 This statement flies in the face of his just stated belief that American schools were failing children and the country, and the fact that large numbers of Americans, including some highly educated ones, continue to be employed in low paying and precarious jobs while millions of others have given up on seeking employment altogether.38 Neither situation is likely to be redressed in the foreseeable future, and no matter the talent and work ethic of those in the ranks of the unemployed or precarious work! Educational inequality is certainly a part of the employment problem for many students and graduates, as are global free trade agreements that have allowed American and other corporations to maximize profits by moving manufacturing overseas in their quest for ever cheaper labor and lower rates of corporate taxation. But, as already explained in previous chapters, the burgeoning of sophisticated technologies that are replacing humans is arguably a more significant factor in unemployment worldwide. This is also a problem in the field of music, although as explained in Chapters 1 and 2, the prognosis for future employment of musicians, artists, and teachers is better than for many other occupations. Nevertheless, perusal of back copies of The International Musician, the official organ of the of International Federation of Musicians in North America, reveals that the musicians’ union has

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for some time been fighting a rearguard action against the encroachment of music technology that has already displaced many professional musicians (and live music) and against the outsourcing of American music jobs by major corporations in the entertainment industries. Music teachers, too, if they continue to narrowly conceive of their professional role primarily in terms of the development of performance expertise may eventually find their own jobs in jeopardy as sophisticated digital technologies and artificial intelligence render traditional instruments and associated forms of expertise irrelevant because they are anachronistic. Inevitably, as one now expects with Trump, politicians are the first to be blamed for this sorry state of American educational affairs for taking “a top-down, one-size fits all approach” and by dictating educational policy for the entire country.39 Among Trump’s suggested solutions to this failure of American children to compare more favorably to those elsewhere was to eliminate or significantly reduce the size and power of the Department of Education so that the social progressives therein could no longer dictate policy and “indoctrinate, not educate, our kids.”40 Few details were provided, and so it is difficult to know precisely what Trump meant by indoctrination, or education for that matter, but he appeared to be suggesting that the department and its employees favored a socialist education model over a democratic capitalist one. He was “totally against” the department and its programs because they were essentially un-American. “What they are doing does not fit the American model of Governance.”41 Referring to his own education in the New York Military Academy as an exemplar for American schools, he described it as having been a “tough, tough place” with “ex-drill sergeants all over the place” who screamed and fought but who were “demanding about everything from academics to personal hygiene.”42 “Honesty and straightforwardness were the rules of law,” which was ironic considering Trump’s notoriety for disregarding truth. From his perspective, education was not about creating democratic citizens who were empathetic, informed, and engaged in the political life of the nation. Rather, it involved teaching children to be physically and mentally tough so they could “win” and “succeed” at what they do and thereby prosper. Education should be “run locally” by parents and school boards who knew best how to educate their children: “Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top are all programs that take decisions away from parents and local school boards” and should be eliminated.43 Consistent in several respects with neoliberal education reform rhetoric globally, the panacea for alleviation of school underperformance on standardized tests or other measures was competition among both students and schools based on parental choice with respect to public, private, magnet, or charter schools.44 Schools failing to attract sufficient numbers of pupils were to be closed. In effect, parental choice was the sole measure of teacher and school accountability. This begged the question of whether parents were always qualified or sufficiently interested and invested in those schools, and in their own children, to judge the quality of teaching, administration, programs, and facilities etc. and how this educational agenda could possibly address the long standing problems of poverty and ghettoization of minority communities and their

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schools.45 Trump’s only proffered solution to this latter problem in Crippled America, aside from school choice, was to allow those communities greater flexibility with “property taxes and other funding involved”—cold comfort to those communities lacking resources owing to poverty and prejudice!46 In 2016, Trump announced an Education Plan that included a twenty-billion dollar program of federal grants to be administered by the states to help “poor children in low-performing public schools enroll at charter and private schools,” a move that critics charged would divert money from public schools to private schools that were unaccountable to government and taxpayers.47 Indeed, given Trump’s criticisms of the Department of Education and his declaration that his Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, “will reform the US education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families,” it would not be unreasonable to propose that he is not committed to the ideal of a public education system.48 The National Education Association’s response to DeVos’s appointment was that “She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize [and] deprofessionalize … public education.”49 Concern was also expressed over her support of for-profit charter schools based on “entrepreneurial models” that “compete with traditional schools for students and funding.”50 Trump’s pre-election proposal to privatize university student loans and to incentivize those institutions to admit students thought to be most likely of achieving economic success upon graduation, and able to repay their loans, was equally problematical because likely to negatively impact economically disadvantaged and academically challenged students. Those wishing to enroll in the arts and humanities would also be affected because regarded by those institutions as “risky investments.” The net effects would be increases in racial and income inequality and “a further deterioration” of programs such as music and the liberal arts whose graduates were thought (wrongly in many cases) to have fewer lucrative economic prospects than those in the sciences and technical fields.51 From Trump’s perspective, and that of his then newly installed Secretary of Education, teachers’ unions were also partly at fault for the lack of education reform that would make it possible for American children to successfully compete with their counterparts internationally because too powerful, self-interested, and resistant to change. By resisting school choice, he declared, those unions were “saying that their product isn’t good enough to compete in a free marketplace.”52 Trump’s anti-unionism as expressed in Crippled America continues to be cause for concern among public school music or other teachers whose hard-won wages, benefits, and improvements to working conditions were achieved through collective bargaining. Parents, however, were also gently chided by him as partly responsible for behavioral problems among school children for failing to demand and model appropriate behavior. If American schools were to become more conducive to education and help make the country great again, they needed to “restore rules about classroom behavior,” if need be by hiring “trained security officers who can enforce those rules.”53

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On a more positive note, Trump claimed in Crippled America to have “great admiration and respect for teachers,” calling for the institution of merit pay to reward the better-performing ones while attracting “the best people to the profession.”54 Nothing was said, however, about how those better-performing or “best” teachers were to be identified. This raises a concern that, as happens all too often with university professors’ student evaluations (see Chapter 5), the selection of “better” teachers or teaching candidates might be based on popularity or military discipline rather than on actual depth of knowledge and quality of instruction. Everything depends, of course, on how one defines the words “best,” “excellence,” or “success.” The word “best,” for example, is often confused in music classes and festivals with technique at the expense of musicality, just as “success” is sometimes wrongly attributed to talent and hard work rather than to privilege, or the luck of being born into families with the right cultural and economic capital.55 Surprisingly, at least to this author, Trump also called for a broader curriculum. “Our national education system was never intended to be limited to the three R’s, history, and science. It was designed to produce well-rounded young people capable of prospering in the world.”56 The term “well-rounded” should be a comfort to teachers of the arts who have long felt vulnerable to marginalization or elimination from schools. Doubtless many music teachers also like what Trump has said about the need for higher educational standards (broadly conceived, it seems, in terms of the pursuit of excellence and quality rather than specific outcomes to be measured quantitatively), competition, discipline, and winning as among the primary educational means of achieving personal success and happiness. American and other music educators have a long history of oft times intense engagement in competitive music festivals in which the emphasis is very much on discipline and winning, typically at the expense of the great majority of children who, by definition, can never succeed in winning. Winning is for the few! The National Association of Music Educators (NAfME) has also long been invested in, and committed to, the national standards movement, although one senses less interest among the membership in standardized testing. Nevertheless, there has long been political pressure for music teachers to adopt those measures. For example, former Arkansas Governor and Republican Mike Huckabee made a statement to that effect in a keynote speech delivered at the NAfME Centennial Conference in 2009 recommending that music teachers invest in standardized testing so they and their programs can be taken more seriously by government and the public. “What we keep score on,” he admonished them, “we consider important.”57 American and other music teachers probably like Trump’s downplaying of the importance of standardized testing in education because those measures are thought to be associated with the aforementioned hypothesized global decline in music education. Many music education academics, including this author, contend that the decades-long obsessions among governments and supranational organizations such as the European Union and the OECD with standardized testing, the socalled basic subjects deemed most important to the global economy, national standards, and outcome-based education have perverted the meaning of the word

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“education” by reducing it to skill-building and regurgitation of predetermined “facts” at the expense of creativity and personal agency.58 Readers will also recall that much of this book has been given to a sustained critique of global neoliberal and conservative education reform—that was initially driven in significant part by conservatives such as Thatcher and Reagan but that was also long ago adopted even by liberals such as President Obama—privileging the so-called basics and STEM subjects the results of which are more amenable to quantitative measurement.

Music education at a tipping point? As Spanish music educator José Luis Aróstegui explained in his 2016 article “Exploring the Global Decline of Music Education,” the problem is not so much that those organizations necessarily fail to appreciate the social and educational value of music (although it is disturbing to me that the concept of value itself continues to be narrowly defined by the above organizations in only economic terms. Many of the things that are valuable or important to us have nothing to do with economics).59 The Director of Education and Skills for the OECD, for example, readily acknowledged in the aforementioned 2013 OECD Report Art for Art’s Sake? that, even if research showed music or other arts education did not contribute to the development in children of skills deemed important to the wider work force, they nevertheless warranted a place in state schools because an important part of “human experience.”60 Readers will also recall from Chapters 1 and 2 that I regard the “art for art’s sake” rationale as a weak justification for music education because nebulous and contributing to the isolation of music from other realms of experience that are vital to understanding its attraction and power in our lives. Rather, the problem is one of mode of assessment and circular thinking. Testing bodies such as the OECD’s PISA program lack assessment tools that are appropriate to the nature of music and the other arts. The arts are susceptible to certain kinds of quantitative measurement. One can, for instance, count the numbers of notes or rhythms heard in a performance or recording, or measure decibel levels, but the experience of that music is fundamentally and firstly qualitative and imaginative. We are drawn to music, or repulsed by it, by the qualities of sound such as tone, articulation, texture, duration, etc. and how they are manipulated by composers and performers, all of which must be imaginatively constructed in the listener’s mind to be understood as an expressive whole. Because music is a temporal art that literally only exists in the fleeing moment as it unfolds, it is only available to the senses a slice at a time and so is experienced firstly subjectively (albeit still mediated by prior experience), although as we have seen throughout this book, listeners’ subjectivities are also vulnerable to corruption by those who would utilize music’s multitudinous expressive qualities of sound and text for purposes of manipulation or control. Among the roots of the problem with respect to music education’s perceived vulnerability to global decline is that decades of neoliberal and conservative rhetoric and propaganda have led generations of politicians, educational bureaucrats, and much of the public to narrowly conceive of standardized tests as the sole measure of

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value. In short, to quote an American respondent to an informal email survey Aróstegui sent to music educators around the world, “we test what we value and we value what we test.”61 Standardized tests effectively “dictate what is taught.”62 Most of Aróstegui’s respondents attributed a perceived decline in music education globally to this narrow emphasis on standardized testing of school subjects regarded as more important to the economy that has resulted in less instructional time and fewer resources for music and related subjects. Several other factors are also involved in this perceived decline of music in school, including outdated teaching models, musical genres, instruments, and ensembles that are already perceived as less culturally relevant to many children in this digital age. Standardization of curricula (including national standards) and testing, however, have been especially damaging to music and the other arts in schools because the enemy of imagination and creativity, not to mention social criticism.63 And indeed, since their establishment in the mid-1990s, the American National Music Education Standards have had little to offer teachers and their pupils with respect to the nature and importance of criticism to their understanding of the profession and the world. Aróstegui’s antidote to this problem of measurement with respect to the arts is for academics and teachers to develop qualitative assessment tools that can demonstrate to politicians and parents what those teachers already know—but that quantitative measures alone cannot reveal because ill-suited to the task—that the arts do in fact develop habits of mind, skills, and abilities that are useful not only to the economy but also to the life well-lived. For many children and youth, music and arts programs offer potential routes to future employment, or help prepare some for other occupations, but as also happens with sports they vivify and enrich present experience making schooling worthwhile to all students because it is no longer dull and drab. To my mind, however, and although obviously highly desirable, vivifying school experience and preparing children for future work, or as amateur musicians, is insufficient justification for music in public schools if music classes fail to contribute to the preparation of citizens who can, and are willing to, think critically in the deep sense of being able to distinguish truth from falsehood and to eventually actively engage in the political life of nations. Today’s music teacher professional associations continue to tout music’s intrinsic value as primary. As stated on the NAfME website, music “energizes and elevates,” which is only partially true: It can just as easily accomplish the opposite.64 Music can also distract, enervate, disturb, or appeal to the basest emotions to incite crime and violence. It can also help to create “better employees and citizens, later in life.”65 Once again, everything depends on how “better” is defined or understood, whether it refers to employees and citizens who are socially, intellectually, and politically passive or self-interested, as opposed to caring and creative individuals who are prepared to participate in the broader life of the nation to contribute to the collective good. In the absence of these kinds of distinctions, professional rhetoric of the sort just quoted from the NAfME website might only be misguided, and no matter how well-intended.

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Thankfully, the US Senate voted in December 2015 to replace the muchdespised No Child Left Behind legislation introduced by former President George W. Bush with a new and bi-partisan (which is a remarkable feat given the state of American politics) law entitled “Every Student Succeeds” (ESSA). The new education law had already taken much of the wind out of Trump’s sails by devolving more power over education to the states, including to a significant extent over standardized testing. Describing No Child Left Behind as “one-size-fits-all” and a “cookie-cutter” program that was overly restrictive for schools, ESSA barred the federal government from mandating benchmarks or “other guidelines for defining school quality.”66 Standardized tests were no longer regarded by the federal government as the only measure of student and teacher achievement. Those tests still retained a place in American education, as an important purpose of the new law was to enable public schools to perform “on par with their international competitors,” which suggested continued participation in national and international testing programs. An important aim of the law, however, was to reduce “the often onerous burden of unnecessary and ineffective testing.”67 States were now permitted to develop their own “accountability systems to measure improvement,” albeit with the stipulation “that quantitative measures outweigh qualitative judgments.”68 As before, objective measures would continue to prevail over qualitative assessments that were more true to the nature of the arts, as the latter were viewed as suspect because subjective and potentially prone to “gaming” with students’ grades.69 There remains in American education a stubborn and puritanical prejudice against, and distrust of, the sensuality and subjectivity of music and the arts in general that puts the lie to the new law’s title “Every Student Succeeds,” for the reality is that things quantitative continue to prevail in schools over qualitative experience that is equally important to the life well-lived.70 Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to assert that life would not be worth living without it. Once again, music and arts students are still not likely to receive the same encouragement and levels of support from governments, school boards, and parents as are those in classes whose subjects are thought to be more useful to the workforce and more lucrative. Nonetheless, and despite the continued privileging of quantitative measurement in the ESSA, there was much in it that should give music educators reason for hope. As Trump also later proposed, the law promised to expand “flexibility for schools to offer all of their students a well-rounded education.”71 True, this language might be interpreted to mean that a well-rounded education was optional, but the admission by the federal government that standardized testing alone was too narrow and “ineffective” because “crowding out teaching and learning” and encouraging a culture of “teaching-to-the-test” is radical and startling because to some extent flying in the face of the neoliberal education reform that has dominated education globally for the past quarter century.72 Given that the United States drove much of the global neoliberal economic and education reform throughout the past quarter century, this “devolution of federal control [over education] to the states” is potentially momentous because suggesting that we might be on the cusp of a new and hopefully more enlightened age of

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education in which Darwinian economics no longer determine what must always be paramount in education.73 Expressed slightly differently, we might be at a tipping point in all education for the better if governments continue to loosen their grip on education, but only, as is explained next, if they replace their policy of enforcement of conformity based on competition and obsessive standardized curricula and testing with a more humane and inclusive policy of ensuring educational fairness. There is, in short, and contrary to Trump’s libertarianism, a role for government in protecting and maintaining the common good by redistributing the economic and, as readers shall see in our next chapter, cultural wealth.

Notes 1 Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 54. 2 R. Michael Warren, “Double Down in Defeat? Even if He’s Defeated, Donald Trump’s Extremist Campaign Could Roil the US for Years Afterwards,” London Free Press, August 20, 2016, p. E1. 3 This short quotation is from an adaption of the book Trump Revealed (New York: Scribner, 2016) by Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish and published by its authors in the Toronto Star. The title of the adaptation is “Inside the Mind of Donald Trump,” Toronto Star, August 20, 2016, p. IN7. 4 See also Trump’s book Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015). Readers will recall that former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, also a conservative, was similarly evasive about his own beliefs. 5 Stanley Fish, “Trump’s Good Bad Speaking Style,” Huffington Post, US ed. Blog, August 31, 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/stanley-fish/trumps-good-bad-speaking-_b_8064902. html para 4. 6 Trump, Crippled America, 131. See also Theodore Schleifer, “Donald Trump On Debate Preparation: ‘I Am What I Am,’” CNN, July 28, 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/07/28/ politics/donald-trump-michael-cohen-disagree-debate/index.html 7 Fish, “Trump’s Good Bad Speaking Style,” www.huffingtonpost.com/stanley-fish/ trumps-good-bad-speaking-_b_8064902.html para 6. Fish suggests that Trump’s political language is in certain respects reminiscent of the prose of French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who described his own writing as “‘the minute to the minute,’ unfolding of ‘changeable and sometimes contradictory notions’” (para. 5). 8 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 142. 9 Ibid. 10 Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 17, quoted by Drolet in American Neoconservatism, 142. See also Fukuyama’s book The End of History and The Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 83, 230. 11 Ibid., xxiii. 12 Ian Buruma speculates that the fundamental reason why so many people vote for “political clowns” like Trump and Boris Johnson (there are plenty of others in the democratic world) is that they are “fed up with the professional political class.” See his article “The Populist Fervour that Fuels the Campaign Clowns,” Globe and Mail, August 6, 2015, p. A12. 13 Fisher and Kranish, Trump Revealed, p. IN7. See also Joseph R. Murray II, “PaleoConservative 2.0: Trump Honest, Turns Flubs Into Feats,” Orlando Sentinel, August 12, 2015, www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-trump-campaign-081215-20150811-story. html Murray is a conservative commentator who formerly worked on Pat Buchanan’s 2000 campaign. Following his election to the Presidency, however, Trump began to surround himself with advisors from the neoconservative camp, including former Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff, and Senate Majority leader Mitch

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McConnell. Many of them have since been replaced, but Trump’s 2018 choice of neoconservative John Bolton as his third Security Advisor in little over a year suggests the neoconservatives remain influential in his government, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/ world/stephen-bannon-how-he-fits-in-trumps-unusual-inner-circle/article32835619/ Nicholas Rescher, “Pragmatism,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 710. This latter short quote was a paraphrase of a statement made by Trump’s former White House Chief Strategist Bannon. See Marc Parry’s “Brains from Which the Alt-Right Sprang,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/Bra ins-From-Which-the/238924 Some of Trump’s critics worried that Bannon might have functioned as a Rasputin-like figure in unduly influencing the President while pushing him into the arms of the Alt-Right movement. Trump’s language of “telling it like it is” suggests that he has far more in common with the American political establishment than he realizes. During the early Cold War and beyond, right wing American politicians—future neoliberals and neoconservatives— were democratic realists, believing that the world was just as they saw it and failing to appreciate the roles of history, ideology, culture, and interpretation in perception. See Westbrook’s, John Dewey and American Democracy, xv. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 64. Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (New York: Allen Lane, 2016), http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/318650/field-guidelies#9780143196280 Dyer refers to the results of the annual Ipsos Mori “Perils of Perception Poll” and its resulting “Index of Ignorance” showing that people in many countries are woefully ignorant of the “realities” in their parts of the world with respect to immigration figures. See Gwynne Dyer, “Political Choices Fuelled by Startling Ignorance,” London Free Press, August 4, 2016, p. A6. Ibid. Heer, “Donald Trump Is Not a Liar,” https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donaldtrump-not-liar Ben Zimmer, “Truthiness,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2010, www.nytim es.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0 Stephen Colbert is quoted in the same on-line article as saying that “I doubt that many people in American politics are acting on the facts.… Everybody on both sides is acting on the things that move them emotionally the most.” See the Merriam-Webster press release, “Merriam Webster Announces ‘Truthiness’ as 2006 Word of the Year,” www.merriam-webster.com/press-release/2006-wordof-the-year Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 65. The Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd ed. rev., defines this term as “the quality of being free from pretence, deceit or hypocrisy; proceeding from genuine feelings.” According to Debby Herbenick and Aleta Baldwin in “What Each of Facebook’s 51 New Gender Options Means,” Daily Beast, February 15, 2014, as of that year there were 51 options for claims to gender identity, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/15/ the-complete-glossary-of-facebook-s-51-gender-options.html Ibid. Journalist Konrad Yakabuski writes that Trump’s narcissism, including a highly unrealistic appraisal of his own qualities and intelligence, is an indication that he is “out of touch with the world around him.” See his “A Campaign that Is Certifiably Alarming,” Globe and Mail, August 15, 2016, p. A9. Boris Johnson, formerly a newspaper reporter in Brussels and later Major of London, was a leader in the Brexit campaign and “helped shape Britain’s cynicism about the EU.” While working as a reporter for The Daily Mail in 1989, he concocted “stories poking fun at the bloc’s bureaucracy, some of which he now admits were not true.” Thomas Penny and Svenja O’Donnell, “From ‘Court Jester’ to Crown Prince: Former London Major Johnson is Well-Positioned for a Run at

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Conservative Leadership in the Wake of Leave Victory,” Globe and Mail, June 25, 2016, p. All. Buruma, “The Populist Fervour that Fuels the Campaign Clowns,” p. A12. Buruma attempts to explain why so many people are willing to support populist leaders who are to some extent ridiculous. See also Penny and O’Donnell, “From ‘Court Jester’ to Crown Prince,” p. A11. To quote just one example of Trump’s extremist, because often highly exaggerated, rhetoric from his 2015 book Crippled America, “The flow of illegal immigrants into this country is one of the most serious problems we face. It’s killing us” (20). The chapter title is “Immigration: Good Walls Make Good Neighbors” (19). Michael Den Tandt, “Trumpism At Bay Here—For Now,” National Post, July 22, 2016, p. A4. Den Tandt explains why Canada remains, at least for the time being, vaccinated against Trumpism. Warren, “Double Down in Defeat?” p. E1. Petula Dvorak, “The ‘Trump Effect’ Is Contaminating Our Kids—And Could Resonate for Years,” Washington Post, March 7, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-trumpeffect-is-contaminating-our-kids–and-could-resonate-for-years-to-come/2016/03/07/ 594a7f46-e47a-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html This column is part of a local headlines newsletter for the Washington region and available on the newspaper’s website. Dvorak’s article is based on only anecdotal evidence, but it is nonetheless worrisome because, if true, suggesting that Trump is modelling and legitimizing this language and behavior to children. Margaret Wente, “Trump Is Finished. Trumpism Is Here to Stay,” Globe and Mail, August 13, 2016, p. F7. See also Warren, “Double Down in Defeat?” According to the OECD document Education at a Glance 2014, the United States “ranks 5th among OECD countries in expenditure per student” (6) at the early childhood education level. Spending on public and private educational institutions “as a percentage of GDP, is on a par with the OECD average at primary, secondary, and post-secondary non-tertiary levels of education” (ibid.). At the tertiary level, however, it spends more in real dollars “than any other country: USD 26,021 per student per year” compared to the OECD average of USD 13, 958 (ibid.). It is not clear in the document whether the latter amount of money per pupil is based on both public and private expenditures or just government funding alone, www.oecd.org/edu/United%20States-EAG2014-Coun try-Note.pdf Trump, Crippled America, 51. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 101. Zinn and Macedo address the myth of the American Dream in Howard Zinn On Democratic Education, 34. Trump once again contradicts himself when talking about the American Dream as if a reality when elsewhere in Crippled America blaming politicians and corporate leaders for the loss of jobs through outsourcing (85). Wente, “America’s Hidden Crisis,” www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/margaret-wente Trump, Crippled America, 50. Ibid. In typical Trump fashion, he offers no evidence or rationale other than the accusation that too many of its personnel are “progressives” to support his claim that “a lot of people believe the Department of Education should just be eliminated,” 51. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. His messages about who should control education vary somewhat in the chapter. At its conclusion, he declares that control of education system should be relegated to “the states and local communities” (59). The US Senate voted to repeal No Child Left Behind in December 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-senate-votes-to-replace-nochild-left-behind-law-1449678245 According to Sean Sullivan and Emma Brown, in “Trump Pitches $20 billion Education Plan at Ohio Charter School that Received Poor Marks from States,” Washington Post, September 8, 2016, the President has no authority over Common Core because “academic standards are determined by the states,” www.

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53 54 55 56 57

washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/09/08/trump-pitches-20-billioneducation-plan-at-ohio-charter-school-that-received-poor-marks-from-state/ Trump, Crippled America, 53. Trump also supports voucher programs and opportunity scholarships. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 59. Sullivan and Brown, “Trump Pitches $20 billion Education Plan.” According to Ashley Parker and Trip Parker in “Donald Trump Releases Education Proposal, Promoting School Choice,” Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2016, Trump’s plan also applies to magnet and public schools, although he clearly prefers the private options, www.wsj. com/articles/u-s-senate-votes-to-replace-no-child-left-behind-law-1449678245 Fox News, “Betsy DeVos Picked for Trump’s Education Secretary,” November 23, 2016, see http://fox43.com/2016/11/23/betsy-devos-picked-for-trumps-education-se cretary/ Kate Zernike writes that DeVos has for twenty years fought for increased educational choice for Michiganders through the establishment of charter schools. Michigan currently supports charter schools, 80 percent of which are “run by for-profit organizations,” to the tune of one-billion dollars a year. An ardent critic of public schools, she has tried to undermine teachers’ unions in part by “steering public dollars away from traditional public schools.” Yet, and although Michigan has radically expanded the reach of charter schools, the state’s educational rankings “have fallen on national reading and math tests. Most charter schools perform below the state average.” Other than these rankings on standardized tests there is “little mechanism for oversight” of these schools. Kate Zernike, “Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Pick, Has Steered Money from Public Schools,” New York Times, November 23, 2016, http://nyti.ms/2ghJLek Fox News, “Betsy DeVos Picked,” http://fox43.com/2016/11/23/betsy-devos-pickedfor-trumps-education-secretary/ Zernike, “Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Pick,” http://nyti.ms/2ghJLek Donald E. Heller, “Trump’s Proposals Could Lock Poor Students Out of College: Why Privatization Would be a Disaster,” New Republic, May 26, 2016, https://newrepublic. com/article/133765/trumps-proposals-lock-poor-students-college Heller is Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs of the University of San Francisco. He refers to data from the Association of American Colleges and Universities showing that liberal arts graduates actually “earn as much as many with more technical degrees.” Music graduates also have a very high rate of student loan repayment. Trump, Crippled America, (56). Trump justifies parental school choice by stating that charter schools allow “smaller class sizes, more individualized instruction, and stricter discipline,” all of which allow for improved student performance (54). Teachers unions are said to be resistant to this. And while acknowledging the importance of teacher accountability, he recommends doing away with “mindless standardized tests” as measures of teacher performance. He prefers “embracing success stories and using them as a model for improving the others.” Perhaps needless to say, it is ironic that Trump decries these, and apparently all, standardized tests as “mindless” while basing his own condemnation of American schools primarily on standardized tests. Toward the end of his chapter, he also calls for state and local “standards for … teachers and students that reward competitive quality and excellence” (59). The meaning of the word “standard” as used here is neither explained nor illustrated and so, once again, it is almost impossible to know what he is recommending. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 56. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 211. Trump, Crippled America, 51–52. Mike Huckabee, “Forward: Excerpts from Governor Mike Huckabee’s Speech to the Centennial Congress,” in Music Education at a Crossroads: Realizing the Goal of Music for All, edited by Janet R. Barrett (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Education in partnership with MENC: The National Association for Music Education, 2009), x. See

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58

59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66 67 68

69

70

also Zakaras and Lowell, Cultivating Demand for the Arts. This report advises American music teachers how they might cultivate greater support for arts education through the adoption of standardized tests. The authors propose a supply-side model of music education because only concerned with the fostering of well-trained musicians and audiences to support them. See, for example, Woodford, “Confronting Innocence,” 51–64; Gareth Dylan Smith, “Neoliberal Violence and Symbolic Violence in Higher Music Education,” in Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice, edited by Lisa C. DeLorenzo, 65–84 (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Horsley, “Facing the Music: Neoliberalism and Music Education,” 62–77. José Luis Aróstegui, “Exploring the Global Decline of Music Education,” Arts Education Policy Review 117, no. 2 (2016): 96–103, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2015. 1007406 Barbara Ishinger, “Foreward,” in Ellen Winner et al., Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education, 3. Aróstegui, “Exploring the Global Decline of Music Education,” 98. Only the initials of the American music educator are provided. Zakaras and Lowell, Cultivating Demand for the Arts, 101. John Kratus, “Music Education at the Tipping Point,” Music Educators Journal, 94, no. 2 (2007): 42–48. Kratus was obviously suggesting that music education in the United States might soon experience rapid decline. Research reported by Kenneth Elpus in 2014, however, found that the proportion of American high school students enrolled in high school music classes had remained stable for the previous three decades. See his article “Evaluating the Effect of No Child Left Behind on US Music Course Enrollments,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 62, no. 3 (October 2014): 215–233, doi: 10.1177/0022429414530759. There is reason to worry, however, that music education might be in decline in other countries, if not also in parts of the United States. NAfME Today: News and Information for Music Educators, “Senate Passes Every Child Achieves Act with Music and Arts as Core Subjects,” Music Educators Journal 102, no. 1 (September 2015): 12. The quoted words were by Michael A. Butera, Executive Director of NAfME. Ibid. Douglas Belkin and Kristina Peterson, “US Senate Votes to Replace ‘No Child Left Behind’ Law,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-senatevotes-to-replace-no-child-left-behind-law-1449678245 Office of the President, “Every Student Succeeds Act: A Progress Report on Elementary and Secondary Education,” December 2015, www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse. gov/files/documents/ESSA_Progress_Report.pdf Belkin and Peterson, “US Senate Votes to Replace ‘No Child Left Behind’.” The new law was signed into force by President Obama on December 10, 2015. See “Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA),” US Department of Education, www.ed.gov/essa?src=rn According to an editorial entitled “No Child Left Behind’s Successor: Congress Rewrites the Bush-Era Law by Giving More Power to the States,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2015, students will continue to take a total of seventeen standardized tests throughout their schooling, www.wsj.com/articles/no-child-left-behinds-successor1448838727 Regrettably, there may be something to this charge of gaming student grades. In my quarter century of evaluating applicants’ high school transcripts for my own institution, I have come to expect impossibly high grades for music compared to other subjects. Needless to say, this distorts students’ averages, making many appear more ready for advanced study than is actually the case. According to the “Every Student Succeeds Act: A Progress Report,” President Obama’s “goal of training 100,000 excellent STEM teachers” since 2008 was already half-way achieved by 2015 (1). The progress report also stated that billions of dollars were invested in early childhood education “to help our youngest learners succeed,” but it is not

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clear to me whether any of this money was earmarked for music programs (1). In addition to the STEM subjects, ESSA emphasized higher educational standards, “rigorous” teacher and student accountability, career preparation, improvements to teacher education, and evidence-based decision-making by government, educational administrators, and teachers, www.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/ documents/ESSA_Progress_Report.pdf 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. See also Alia Wong, “The Bloated Rhetoric of No Child Left Behind’s Demise: What Replacing the Despised Law Means for America’s Schools,” Atlantic, December 9, 2015. 73 ESSA has been described as “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter century.” Editorial, “No Child Left Behind’s Successor.” Additional information about ESSA is available on the NAfME website, www.nafme.org/wp-content/files/ 2015/11/ESSA-In-Plain-EnglishFINAL-2-2016.pdf

8 ON THE RETURN OF HISTORY Toward a liberal music education

Let me repeat, now that I have reached the end, what I said at the beginning: man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

Fukuyama’s aforementioned 1989 essay and later book The End of History prophesized the global “victory of liberal democracy as the guiding ideology for the modern nation-state” and leading to “the spread of the ‘universal homogeneous state.”1 More recently, Jennifer Welsh explained in her 2016 book The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-first Century that the frequent and serious political, cultural, economic, military, and migratory disturbances and disruptions of the past quarter century suggest a move toward fragmentation and ideological differentiation rather than continued integration through globalization.2 Whereas Fukuyama prophesied the end of ideological polarization after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise and spread of neoliberal globalization—witness President Obama’s statement at his 2009 inaugural address in which he called for a “declaration of independence … from ideology” and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s similar statement that he “doesn’t do isms”—Welsh warned that massive inequalities of wealth between the majority and the ultra-rich have made liberal democracy less attractive to many and given rise to populist leaders such as Trump having little respect for government institutions and constitutionally guaranteed rights.3 Neoliberal globalization must bear much of the blame for this situation, not because free trade agreements and supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank are inherently bad—the return of high levels of tariffs on trade and a lack of all international regulation whatsoever would likely slow economic recovery—but because Fukuyama was correct that “twentyfirst century Americans” and citizens of other liberal democracies “have by and

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large submitted to a system whose permanence is assumed; they focus their energies on the private pleasures of consumerism rather than cultivating the public good or the political or economic interests they share with others.”4 In short, and as Dewey foresaw in The Public and Its Problems, unfettered capitalism, because it is essentially hedonistic and technocratic in its operating principles, has allowed for a plutocracy of which President Trump is a member that has alienated many citizens because of failing to ensure the fundamental democratic principles and practices of fairness and equality. Trump is feeding on, and actively fostering, feelings of disfranchisement and resentment to the established model of liberal democracy to present an “ideafree alternative built only on rejection, isolation, intolerance, total power, and subordination.”5 In short, and as suggested by his education plan reviewed in the previous chapter, Trump has few ideas of his own. Far from recommending or supporting Trump in his attacks on liberal democracy, Welsh called for its reinvigoration through recognition of the “value of fairness” in redistributing wealth more equitably while encouraging greater public participation in political debates and decision-making. Something must be done to combat this nativist and populist movement if liberal democracy is to be preserved, and she is essentially calling for social democracy in which “risk and reward are … to be shared.”6 As is explained shortly in relation to multicultural music education, this idea of redistributing wealth should be broadened to include cultural wealth because important to social well-being. We are used to thinking of wealth in monetary terms, but the archaic definition was “well-being,” from the “Middle English welthe, from well or weal, on the pattern of health.”7 It referred to an abundance of something desirable, whether food, money, or other things that contributed to health, and, as philosopher Jane Roland Martin has observed, “in the case of culture the issue is one of superabundance.”8 In fact, other scholars and writers emphasize that Trump’s political success is less about economics as it is about culture. A surprising number of his adherents are actually relatively well-off financially, although many lack a higher education. Readers may recall from Chapter 4 on former Canadian Prime Minister Harper’s and American neoconservatives’ disdain for certain kinds of musicians and artists, that the struggle between American liberals and neoconservatives since the 1980s has been over culture, and less so about economics (despite what neoconservatives might say publicly). Neoconservatives conceive of culture as a means of controlling the public through an aestheticization of politics. Journalist John Doyle reminds us that Trump’s rise to popular celebrity status began with his appearance on the 2004 reality television program The Apprentice, modelled after other popular realty shows such as Survivor and Big Brother, that celebrated bad behavior and winning at all costs. The former program normalized Trump’s outlandish behavior and mannerisms to the American public, many of whom were already living “in a Kardashian world” of pop culture.9 Primed by years of reality television, which “is, in a way, part of a vendetta against an imposed culture of refinement,” Trump’s “crudeness and male aggression displayed as honesty and perpetuated as a leadership quality” appealed to many older white males

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(and a surprising number of white females as well) who were already experiencing a deep “psychic sense of relative loss of influence caused by the increasingly equal status of black and brown Americans.”10 Interestingly, Survivor first appeared in Sweden under the name Expedition Robinson, after Daniel Dafoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe “crossed with” William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Survivor and other reality television shows, as Doyle continues, are “anchored in age-old or primordial impulses and parables” about whether “tamed, bourgeois people could survive in the wild” and how the danger is that “they revert to their most crude, arrogant, animalistic, reckless instincts.”11 This, Doyle emphasizes, is why reality television warrants careful study and scrutiny and ought not be dismissed as mere entertainment. Yet other writers decry what is perceived to be a lack of appropriate language in mainstream politics to combat the kinds of extremism of charismatic or strong leaders such as Trump, calling for a “new language to appeal, emotionally as well as substantively, to that large part of the populist electorate that is not irredeemably xenophobic, racist, and misogynist. Rhetoric alone obviously won’t do it,” but music and art education can certainly help with this important task of countering injustice and authoritarianism while fostering social and political renewal.12 Dewey declared in Art As Experience that “the moral function of art … is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing [or the ear from listening as opposed to merely hearing], tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive.”13 As was suggested in Chapters 2 and 3, all of the arts can be employed in education as political tools for redressing “the nation’s anemic civic health.”14 If teachers and their programs are to be most effective in this task, however, they will need to reconceive of their own professional role and identity more as cultural workers than as teachers of voice or this or that instrument, or as arbiters of absolute truths, and for the reason just stated that the current political schism in the western world is fundamentally about culture, and less so about economics. President Obama made this important point in the lead-up to the November 2016 Presidential election when he declaimed that the political contest between democrats and Trump’s republicans was ultimately about the meaning of America and its place in the world. Politics and economics were only means to that end, which was essentially cultural. And culture, as Dewey said, is conditioned by art more than by any other one thing.… The ordinances of religion and the power of law are efficacious as they are clothed with a pomp, a dignity and majesty that are works of imagination. If social customs are more than uniform external modes of action, it is because they are saturated with story and transmitted meaning.15 As he stated in Art As Experience “the final measure of the quality of … culture is the arts which flourish.”16 The advantage of music or art teachers thinking of themselves firstly as cultural workers and only secondarily as teachers or instructors is that whereas the former implies they should be orienting students’ critical

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attention outward toward the music and art in their world and their relation to society, the latter conjures images of teachers, students, and their parents all looking myopically inward to the school as a refuge from reality. Music and art education should for all the reasons articulated in this book be conceived primarily as preparation for adulthood and democratic and global citizenship and not just the training of future performers and consumers. This is not, however, to suggest that children should be rushed into adulthood. They are entitled to enjoy childhood in all that it implies, including ample opportunities for play and personal creativity. Both are important to the pursuit of the good life, and throughout the lifespan. Adulthood and democratic citizenship are far off goals to be attained gradually and with maturation through experience involving a fruitful combination of playful and serious endeavor as children and youth enlarge their understanding of humanity, and including its foibles. To reiterate Dewey’s ideas from earlier in this book about the significance of music (and art in general) in our lives, certain kinds of music can vivify everyday experience leading to a heightened perception and deeper understanding of worldly conditions.17 Just as importantly, music can sometimes express meanings obliquely and with greater subtlety and emotional immediacy than language in helping to sway people in their beliefs while exercising their moral imaginations in ways that might alter their existing political or world views.18 The arts are important intellectual and social tools for reimagining society and the world in ways that, to quote Dewey once again from Chapter 2, when contrasted with existing conditions can constitute the “the most penetrating ‘criticism’ of the latter than can be made.”19 Maxine Greene later expanded on Dewey’s point about the critical potential of the arts to metaphorically open up “mysterious clearings in people’s lives, so they can walk out of the forest and can breathe … or maybe use the clearing to see themselves in a new light.”20 One immediately thinks, for example, of the potentially powerful and persuasive impact of the Broadway musical Hamilton, featuring a racially diverse cast, on Vice-President elect Mike Pence even before he was confronted by the cast at the show’s conclusion.21

Music education in a time of rage The efficacy and success of this practice of swaying people in their beliefs depends on whether the latter are already consumed by prejudice, hatred, rage or hubris, are rigid in their beliefs, or oblivious to subtlety and nuance. Michael LaPointe, in a review of Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: A History of the Present, writes that Mishra “leaves us to wonder: Can we fight anger with anger, or will we have to find a new emotional engagement to usher in a new age?”22 My own answer is probably both, and depending on the audience and its circumstances. It would, for example, be harmful to the civic health of the nation were leaders with authoritarian tendencies such as Trump or Marine Le Pen of “the right-wing anti-immigration National Front” in France never publicly confronted and held to account for their vitriol by journalists, academics, musicians, or other critics, as

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that would only exacerbate the problems of democratic fragmentation and growing authoritarianism.23 Dewey thought that artists and musicians best exercised their social criticism indirectly, by disclosure, but philosophers and other public intellectuals were charged with speaking “directly and self-consciously” to the powers-that-be and to the public about the state of society.24 Dewey expressed his own criticisms of the American polity very directly and forcefully in a number of his publications, including The Public and Problems and Art as Experience. The former book, first published in1926 and reprinted in 1947, warned of the rise of an oligarchy of the “captains of capitalistic society” that was maintained by a managerial class of experts and spin doctors.25 Art as Experience similarly commenced with a pointed critique of the nouveaux-riches whom he blamed for the museum and concert hall culture that removed so-called fine art and music from the everyday experience of the masses, thereby contributing to their political disfranchisement. Indeed, the latter book is described by his biographer Robert Westbrook as “one of the most powerful statements of [his] politics.”26 Like Plato in this one important respect, Dewey conceived of the arts as expressions of “the emotions and ideas that are associated with the chief institutions of social life” and thus vital to the civic and political health of the nation. None of Plato’s contemporaries, he reminds us, “would have doubted that music [italics mine] was an integral part of the ethos and the institutions of the community. The idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ would not have been even understood.”27 Dewey vigorously defended the arts in education, boldly stating that their elimination from public schools would amount to a dumbing down of the curriculum resulting in the creation of a “docile peasantry”!28 Artistic freedom was as important to the pursuit of democracy as were freedom of speech and inquiry. Those calling for the removal of the arts from public schools were either wealthy and sent their children to private schools or disbelieved “in the whole democratic endeavour.”29 Strong words, indeed! Dewey was wrong, though, in suggesting that musicians and artists (and children learning how to make music) ought not exercise their social criticism directly lest it negatively impact the artistic quality of their work. When artists engaged in “direct, self-conscious moral criticism the result was usually bad art.”30 Creativity required periods of relaxation free from disturbance so that individuals were not distracted or preoccupied with expressly political purposes at the expense of artistic inspiration. The latter occurred “not by set purpose but in flashes, and flashes are intense and illuminating, they set us on fire, only when we are free from special preoccupations.”31 This distinction between the critical roles of artists and philosophers is a false dualism most likely attributable to a latent idealism in his work relating to the cultivation of taste.32 Although critical of the concept of connoisseurship as elitist, and while admonishing his readers that art could not exercise its political functions so long as it remained “the beauty parlor of civilization,” it had to be enjoyable as a “consummated movement of matter integrated through its inner relations into a single qualitative whole.”33 Direct criticism in art or music might frustrate the pursuit

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of artistic quality and appreciation because possibly perceived as confrontational or otherwise hindering enjoyment.34 Only when “liberated from limitation to a specialized end” are forms “esthetic and not merely useful.”35 The danger here is that Dewey’s emphasis on musical and artistic quality among practitioners might relegate them to secondary status as public intellectuals because too “precious” or “polite” in the sense of being “affectedly concerned with elegant or refined behavior” and somewhat removed from the nitty gritty of political realities.36 They might inspire change with the power of their imaginations, but it remained for philosophers or other public intellectuals to interpret the former’s meanings and to provide the necessary political direction as a spur to action. Viewed in this way, musicians and artists were less culture workers directly engaged in the cultural and political life of the nation as they were oracles to intellectual elites and the public. The implications of the above criticism of Dewey for music education are obvious but nevertheless bear explicit statement. Whereas Dewey argued forcefully elsewhere that children needed to be introduced in school to the most contentious issues of the day so better informed and able to function as moral agents and democratic citizens in shaping their world, this recommendation apparently did not apply to music composition or performance classes lest it distract children from their music-making and thereby negatively impact its artistic quality and enjoyment. Following this logic, children in those classes were ironically not to have quite as much freedom as their peers in academic classes, including presumably general music classes, because more constrained in their thinking and acting by Dewey’s delimiting of contention therein. Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker magazine, helps to explain my concern here in stating that musicians’ and artists’ sublimation of their politics into their work might cause it to be misperceived as “mute” or “noncommittal” and thus not particularly important in the grand educational and political scheme of things. In this “time of rage … any form of artistic expression that fails to make its political convictions explicit” is not likely to help overmuch in countering Trump’s “Great Besmirchment” of global politics.37 Indeed, with respect to the abovementioned musical Hamilton, Vice-President Pence might have been personally swayed by the musical’s political content and indirectness of meaning, but it was the cast’s direct verbal appeal to him at the conclusion of the night that brought the evening’s performance to the attention of the public! Recall as well that the cast was severely criticized by conservative political pundits for daring to confront Pence at a public venue, and no matter how well-intended or politely worded. To repeat the title of Laura Ingraham’s book, they were told to “Shut up and sing.”38 It would seem that in certain quarters of American society there is a proscription against musicians and artists exercising their rights as democratic citizens to speak their minds. As Ross continues, many classically-trained musicians are experiencing a sense of paralysis during the current political schism, asking “Should they carry on as before, nobly defying the ruination of public discourse” by making music as they have before, either aloof from politics or remotely engaging in it indirectly through their

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work, or should they boldly bring their politics to the fore? The answer is all of the above, for as Ross concludes, “ultimately, artists [and musicians] of integrity will have no choice in how they respond” to Trump’s politics.39 “Those who thrive on politically charged material will continue in that vein,” but “if artists everywhere were to give themselves over to agitprop, something essential would be lost. To create a space of refuge, to enjoy a period of respite, is not necessarily an act of acquiescence.”40 Quoting percussionist and conductor Steven Schick, Ross writes that avant-garde music, for example, can be seen as a “resistance born of complexity” and a form of “dissent … that cannot be assimilated into the pop-culture machine that Trump has mastered and disarmed.”41 All that may be true, but so, too, would “something essential be lost” if the longstanding myth of music’s autonomy from politics be permitted to continue discouraging composers, musicians, music teachers, and their pupils from choosing to use their music to engage more directly and boldly with the world. At risk of exaggeration, innumerable musicians and artists have throughout history intended their work as direct, and sometimes blunt, criticism to reveal or highlight ugly truths such as the horror and inhumanity of war or the social, economic, and political dangers of the casino capitalism that created the conditions for the Great Recession of 2008. Today, and as was touched on in Chapter 4, we tend to forget that left-wing popular musicians have had a long and distinguished history of expressing their idealism and political dissent directly through their music. We could use more of those musicians today who are not afraid to engage in social protest to alert the public of the dangers, for example, of President Trump’s stated plans for increased American isolationism and deregulation of banks. Regrettably, if British journalist John Harris is correct, “these days, it too often feels like the spirit of dissent is the preserve of past generations, there to be reverentially saluted rather that reinvented.” Pop culture’s response to heavy-handed governments has been “non-committal, heavy on irony, essentially apolitical.”42 If true, this would lend additional support to my argument that music teachers need to rethink their historical obsession with performance alone, as an end in itself, and redefine all of what they do as important to a liberal education and democratic citizenship. This theme of a liberal music education has been addressed (and modelled) throughout this book and is explored in more depth below in relation of the importance of teachers helping students develop critical voices and ideas of their own. Before doing so, though, we need to return to the abovementioned idea of music and art contributing to social well-being through the redistribution of cultural wealth. Music educators have in fact been doing this for many years through the practice of multicultural music education, albeit not without problems and with varying degrees of success.43 Perhaps multicultural music education’s greatest potential contribution to social renewal and the rejuvenation of liberal democracy is through the socialization of children to other peoples and their beliefs and values through the broadening and deepening of their musical and social experience. By learning more about the abundance, richness, and complexity of music—and of visual art, dance, food,

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architecture, or literature etc.—around them and in the world children and youth will likely be better prepared to recognize and resist the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny of populist or other leaders who would undermine liberal democracy by fostering a culture of fear of “others” founded on ignorance.44 Beginning in the 1960s, multiculturalism was celebrated by our respective western governments because thought to foster democratic citizens who could “work with others to find sites of commonality, despite differences.”45 Following the elections of Thatcher and Reagan, however, that rationale was “replaced with a meaner, harder logic of competition on a global scale, and of a strategic, outwardlooking cosmopolitanism.”46 Multiculturalism was, and remains, valued by government primarily because it facilitates global economic competitiveness, and less so because it contributes to the maintenance of a civil society based on mutual respect and an appreciation of cultural differences. If President Trump values the arts and multiculturalism at all it is likely as economic tools rather than as expressions of our common humanity or as a celebration of the human spirit! Those in music or in the broader fields of education and cultural studies who believe in multiculturalism as a positive force in society and the world will accordingly need to work and lobby very long and hard for a return to the earlier conception of multiculturalism in education as linked to democratic citizenship because culturally enriching and important to the defense and maintenance of civil society. This admonition comes, however, with the proviso that non-western musics and musical practices no longer be romanticized in education. Huib Shippers recently observed that non-western musics continue to be exoticized, fetishized, and decontextualized in western educational institutions at all levels, and so school children probably do not realize those musics are as susceptible to commodification, colonization, and other forms of exploitation, or to implication in oppression or injustice, as are their western counterparts.47 There is, for the reasons articulated in this book about the power of music as a persuasive tool in the shaping of consciousness, no musics or musical practices that are value-free and politically neutral and thus beyond criticism in the sense of requiring an understanding of their historicity and social, political, and moral dimensions. In the end, and as Canada’s immigration minister Ahmed Hussen reminds us, “multiculturalism is not about song and dance” for their own sakes. “It is about integration, and integration presumes true equality.”48 In short, multiculturalism is inevitably a political goal and policy requiring greater clarity of definition and, for those who believe in equality, equity, and social justice, requiring a strong defense. The point I am trying to make here is that there has long been an antiintellectualism in music education in that teachers have too often been content in their classrooms to remain at the level of the notes and performance thereof, with only a very little traditional theory or history.49 If they attend at all to music’s social and political meanings, it is by “looking at the bright side,” by celebrating its positive dimensions while ignoring its more sordid aspects. Owing to a fear of controversy, a culture of timidity, and the myth of the political neutrality of schools, those teachers have generally neglected to challenge children and youth to

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read between, behind, and around the notes to decipher and when necessary criticize the motivations and intentions of all those involved in or with music—those who have composed, improvised, marketed, performed, taught, recorded, broadcasted, consumed, or otherwise used music—so they can gain greater insight into Dewey’s aforementioned “human contribution” (see Chapter 1).50 Lest some readers might think this an exercise in negativity, the aim is to help students acquire a broader and deeper understanding of the pervasiveness and significance of music in their lives by examining the full range of human musical experience, including its “gritty materialities.”51 Only then can they gain a better appreciation of its richness, moral complexity, and difficulty, and including musicians’ and music educators’ complicity at times in social and political problems.

On developing students’ voices A comment heard often in education today, and including in music education, is that children in school should develop their own voices so as to be prepared in adulthood to participate in the political debates and decision-making that Welsh [and Dewey long before her] believed were essential to the defense of liberal democracy.52 As suggested previously in this book, in this age of post-truth and social media, individuals are freer than ever before to express their personal opinions on-line, and no matter their qualifications or how well- or ill-informed. As was noted by Deresiewicz in Excellent Sheep, his own university undergraduates all too often had an immediate opinion on virtually any topic presented to them, even if they had never encountered or thought about it before: “Their minds were like a chemical bath of conventional attitudes that would instantly precipitate out of solution and coat whatever object you introduced.”53 But if one wishes to contribute intelligently to political or other discourses, for example, about public health care or the desired continued inclusion of music education in public schools, there must be some reasonable prospect of distinguishing truth from conventional attitudes, habit, mere opinion, bias, prejudice, propaganda, fake news, myth, double-speak, half-truths, truthiness, bullshit, and lies. Only then can one realize that problems or difficulties exist, let alone “think around them” in order to have something substantive to say that might contribute to their amelioration.54 Having a voice to express one’s opinions or vent inchoate feelings about the topic du jour does not suffice if one wishes to be heard and taken seriously by others when making proposals with respect to the good life and society. One must have something to say and be willing to engage intellectually with others, rather than simply vent inchoate feelings, beliefs, or prejudices. As Kingwell admonishes university students, feelings cannot, by themselves, address the legacies of oppression. Nor is it useful to honour your experience simply because it is yours. Sooner or later you are going to have to argue. There is, finally, such a thing as non-bogus civility, not the sly silencing of opposition with politeness but, instead, a robust demand for everyone to risk engagement.55

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All of this entails hard work in our media and music-saturated world because it involves careful analyses of people’s truth claims and agendas for music and education and their resulting and oft times shifting meanings, such as happens when music and pedagogy are co-opted, misappropriated, or otherwise distorted. As Kingwell concludes, “Discourse is fragile; we have to go on decoding and decoding our language [or music] and its agendas. Final truth does not emerge, only the endless pursuit of it that marks us as rational beings.”56 This is, of course, not to say that there is ultimately no possibility for truth whatsoever. It is just that it is partial, often extremely complex, elusive because subject to interpretation, misappropriation, and contestation and thus hard-earned. Nor for the same reasons is there such a thing as a universal or ultimate reality. Human beings interpret their experience, which is endlessly varied, and no one person can possibly perceive and take in all that impacts the senses, let alone take in much of the world at any one time, or even over the course of a lifetime. Consciousness, like music, is an illusion. We literally live in the moment, in a slice of time, which requires that most of what we know of our everyday world must be imaginatively and continuously reconstructed, synthesized, held in memory, and then reapplied as part of an interpretive framework to present and future experience. Having said that, and while different interpretations of reality and truth are to be expected, as warned earlier, it would be foolish, even dangerous, to assume that there are no facts, truth, or reality at all, that everything is only fiction, myth, opinion, or illusion in the sense of having no objective existence whatsoever. Clearly, some interpretations are better than others because more informed and based on evidence and/or philosophical reasoning and greater breadth and depth of experience coupled with more careful and sustained analyses of people and events. For Dewey, philosophy was a cultural practice concerned with the problems of man and “knowing was a mediating function serving human interests.”57 Plato’s philosopher kings were right when realizing they needed each other in order to understand! For Dewey, the task for teachers was not to tell students “what” but “how to think” while introducing them to new and oft times provocative or contentious ideas that would stimulate critical thought. The former were not to impose their own truths, moral judgments, or musical appraisals onto students as matters of unquestioned fact or dogma but to encourage them to judge for themselves the truth of the matters before them and warrant their own beliefs and practices. Teachers were, of course, entitled to their own opinions and predilections as a basis for their own inquiry and growth. One must start somewhere. The challenge for teachers and social critics both was to avoid ossification and the resulting inflexibility of values that was likely to stunt personal and social growth.58 As described in How We Think, this entailed “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends.”59 This was, and remains, the pragmatist conception of truth. As regarded by Dewey and other pragmatists, including this author, truth is uncertain and hence only tentative, requiring that its veracity be continuously judged anew according to the extent it contributes to the amelioration

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of social problems.60 The pursuit of truth was a moral and communal—and thus often messy and difficult—undertaking as individual scholars or others contributed the fruits of their own intellectual labors to the discourses in question. Challenging students to think for themselves, in significant part by introducing them to controversial music and related political, educational, or other issues, ideas, and material—or by problematizing music they consume in their daily lives—is the essence of a liberal music education and a necessary preparation for participation in liberal democracy because making it possible for them to question and think seriously about what they think they know or encounter, including this book and everything in it, to judge for themselves their meanings and veracity.61 That, however, is but the first step in a liberal education and preparation for democratic citizenship, for having done their own homework in carefully reading, analysing, and questioning ideas encountered in this book, for example, and some of which are intended to challenge their own presuppositions, there must be a willingness to research and read or otherwise explore widely and deeply the issues so as to contextualize them while becoming better informed so able to respond intelligently. All of this might prompt students to change what they think, which involves risk and might be perceived as threatening or otherwise discomforting to some. The purpose of a liberal education, though, is to change, otherwise there is no point in going to university in the first place. Deresiewicz quotes Allan Bloom as saying that “True liberal education requires that the student’s whole life be radically changed. … Liberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything” as they seek out ideas of their own.”62 This experience can be uncomfortable, states Deresiewicz, but often exhilarating when one becomes “driven by a need to work things through for yourself, so that you won’t be damned to go through life second hand, thinking other people’s thoughts and dreaming other people’s dreams.”63 This was Orwell’s message in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, “that truth is elusive, perhaps sometimes even indeterminate, but worth seeking out and not to be taken on trust.”64

Notes 1 Jennifer Welsh, The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-first Century (House of Anansi Press, 2016), 8, 21. 2 Ibid. Welsh is formerly Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary General on the Responsibility to Protect. 3 Ibid., 22. 4 Ibid., 276. 5 Doug Saunders, “Review of The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-first Century, by Jennifer Welsh” (House of Anansi Press, 2016), Globe and Mail, September 17, 2016, p. R14. 6 Welsh, The Return of History, 292–293. Significantly, even the OECD no less now recognizes what is termed “inclusive growth” as a basis for civil society and collective prosperity. Edward Greenspon and Kevin Lynch, “The World is Ripe for New Economic Thinking: Who Will Offer the New Model to Confront Our Slow-Growth Age?” Globe and Mail, October 1, 2016, p. B4. 7 Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd ed. (2006), s.v. “wealth.”

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8 Jane Roland Martin, “The Wealth of Cultures and Problems of Generations,” in Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook, edited by S. Tozer, (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1998), 25. 9 John Doyle, “Trump’s Road from Reality TV to President-Elect, Explained,” Globe and Mail, November 12, 2016, p. R14. 10 Ibid. The latter of the three short quotes in this sentence is from Doug Saunders,’ “White Washed: The Real Reason Donald Trump Got Elected,” Globe and Mail, November 12, 2016, p. F5. Saunders draws for some of his analysis on historian Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) and Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, reprint ed. (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2005). 11 Doyle, “Trump’s Road from Reality TV,” R14. 12 Timothy Garton Ash, “Pushing Back Against Populism: If We Want to Avoid becoming a ‘Postliberal world’ We Must Brace Ourselves for a Generational Struggle,” Globe and Mail, November 12, 2016, p. F7. 13 Dewey, Art As Experience, 325. 14 A Crucible Moment, ii. 15 Dewey, Art As Experience, 326–327. 16 Ibid., 345. 17 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183. 18 Dewey, Art As Experience, 238. 19 Ibid., 346. 20 This quotation and description of Greene’s ideas with respect to the critical potential of the arts to change people’s lives is by Sebastian Ruth, a violist involved in the Community Music Works project in Providence, Rhode Island. The quotation appears in Alex Ross, “Learning the Score,” New Yorker, September 4, 2006, 88. See also Connie Sowa Wachala, “Music: An Instrument for Social Renewal,” South Shore Journal, 2 (2007): 5–13. 21 Patrick Healy, “‘Hamilton’ Cast’s Appeal to Pence Ignites Showdown with Trump,” New York Times, November 19, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/us/politics/hamiltoncast-mike-pence-donald-trump.html?_r=0 22 Michael LaPointe, “Review of Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra,” Globe and Mail, April 13, 2017, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/ book-reviews/pankaj-mishras-age-of-anger-reviewed-a-history-of-our-present-worldgone-mad/article33888661/ 23 Les Perreaux, “France’s Marine Le Pen Blasts Quebec, Canadian Politics,” Globe and Mail, March 21, 2016, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/frances-marine-le-penblasts-quebec-canadian-politics/article29322218/ 24 Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 398. As Westbrook explains, to Dewey, “art provided human beings a glimpse of what the world would look like if they had godlike powers” (397). 25 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 200. 26 Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 401. 27 Dewey, Art As Experience, 7–8. 28 John Dewey, “Shall We Abolish School ‘Frills’? No.” Rotarian, (May 1933). Reprinted in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 9: 1933–1934, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 146. 29 Ibid., 142. 30 Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 398. 31 Dewey, Art As Experience, 275–276. Dewey apparently believed that creativity in philosophy and science also depended on periods free from distraction when individuals were “relaxed almost to the point of reveries” (ibid.). It is thus curious that he nevertheless assigned art and philosophy different critical roles. 32 Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 399. For a discussion of the “Hegelian residues in Dewey’s thought,” see pp. 13–14.

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33 Dewey, Art As Experience, 344, 130. 34 Ibid., 344. To quote Dewey about art and enjoyment, “Any activity that is productive of objects whose perception is an immediate good, and whose operation is a continual source of enjoyable perception of other events exhibits fineness of art” (365). 35 Ibid., 116 36 Oxford Dictionary of English, s.v. “precious.” There is something to this criticism. While Dewey referred in Art As Experience to utensils and other industrial objects as possibly having artistic qualities, whatever “charm” or artistic qualities they might have had were abrogated by the worker’s or consumer’s fluency of use and action in the sense of being habitual, “mechanical or automatic,” and thus less likely to be appreciated as art. “A work of art,” contrarily, “demands the practice of resistances that inhibit such action. About the latter fact there can be doubt” (261). This idea of resistance in music and art later became the intellectual basis for Bennett Reimer’s philosophy of music education as aesthetic education in North America and beyond between 1970 and 1995, albeit stripped of Dewey’s politics. For more about the early days of the music education and aesthetic education movement in the United States after World War Two, see Paul Woodford, “Dewey’s Bastards: Music, Meaning, and Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol. 2, edited by Gary McPherson and Graham Welch, 698–701 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 37 Alex Ross, “Making Art in a Time of Rage,” New Yorker, February 8, 2017, www. newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/making-art-in-a-time-of-rage 38 See Ingraham’s Shut Up and Sing. 39 Ross, “Making Art in a Time of Rage.” 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 John Harris, “Someone Out There, Please Pick Up a Guitar and Howl,” Guardian, November 21, 2010, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/04/someone-p ick-up-guitar-and-howl 43 See Deborah Bradley, “Good for What, Good for Whom? Decolonizing Music Education Philosophies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, edited by Wayne D. Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega, 409–443 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Bradley argues that music education philosophy is itself colonizing of other peoples because North American or Eurocentric and she proffers some ideas for how practitioners might contribute to “decolonizing counter narratives” in their own fields (428). 44 Doug Saunders, in “White Washed,” observes that many of Trump’s voters live in areas of the country in which the populace is predominantly white, just as those in England who voted for Brexit and against increased immigration live in rural areas in which there are relatively few immigrants. One of his suggestions for alleviating this problem is better social planning to encourage greater social integration for the future (p. F5). 45 Katharyne Mitchell, “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 28, no. 4 (2003): 392. 46 Ibid. 47 Huib Schippers, Facing the Music: Shaping Music Education from a Global Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 48 Erin Anderssen and Michelle Zilio, “Border Guard,” Globe and Mail, March 11, 2017, p. F3. 49 Alexandra Kertz-Welzel writes of what she perceives to be a tendency toward antiintellectualism among some community music leaders. See “Daring to Question: A Philosophical Critique of Community Music,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 24, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 113–130. Estelle Jorgensen more than a decade ago similarly observed that there has been an anti-intellectualism among American music educators as evidenced by a “lack of interest in scholarship and uncritical acceptance of ideas and practices.” See Transforming Music Education, x. 50 Dewey, Art As Experience, 245.

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51 Michael Apple, “Creating Difference: Neo-liberalism, Neo-conservatism and the Politics of Educational Reform,” Educational Policy, 18, no. 1 (2004): 14. 52 See Gary Spruce, “Music Education, Social Justice, and the ‘Student Voice,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, eds. Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schmidt, Gary Spruce, and Paul Woodford, 287–301 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 53 Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 80. 54 Ibid. I am paraphrasing Deresiewicz here. 55 Mark Kingwell, “Campus Discord: Shout if you Must. But First Have Something to Say,” Globe and Mail, November 21, 2015, www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/campus-discordshout-if-you-must-but-first-have-something-to-say/article27394746/?service=print 56 Ibid. 57 Westbrook, Dewey and American Democracy, 138. 58 Dewey, Art As Experience, 324–325. 59 John Dewey, How We Think, 1910, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 6 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1983), 185. 60 Westbrook, Dewey and American Democracy, 130. For similar definitions of the pragmatist conception of truth, see Wayne Bowman, “No One True Way: Music Education Without Redemptive Truth,” in Music Education for Changing Times, edited by Thomas Regelski and Terry Gates, 3–15 (New York: Springer, 2010) and, in the same volume, Scott Goble’s “Pragmatism, Music’s Import, and Music Teachers as Change Agents,” 85–95. 61 It is worth noting that, to Dewey, meaning and truth were not necessarily the same. “Meaning is wider in scope as well as more precious in value than is truth, and philosophy is occupied with meaning rather than with truth … meaning is the wider category; truths are but one class of meanings, namely those in which a claim to verifiability by their consequences is an intrinsic part of their meaning” (John Dewey, “Philosophy and Civilization,” in Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy, edited by Joseph Ratner (New York: The Modern Library, 1939), 247). 62 Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 84. 63 Ibid., 86. 64 Tim Conley, “Fact or Fiction: Are We Living in an Orwellian Era?” Globe and Mail, February 18, 2017, p. F7.

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INDEX

abstract knowledge and skills 17, 21, 66 academics 20, 40, 48, 53, 100, 102 accountability 20, 58, 67, 69, 98, 103 A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future 22 Adorno, T. 18 aesthetic enthusiasm 1 aestheticization of politics 52, 111 agitprop 116 Allsup, R. 29, 32–8 alt-right 38 American Constitution 39; Declaration of Independence, 32, 43n22; Dream 39, 97; empire 62n56, 80, 81, 87; ethnocentrism 85; exceptionalism 3, 81, 83–5; expansionism 81; hegemony 84; imperialism, 80–3; innocence, myth of 80; jazz 66; militarism 81, 89n22; model of governance 98; patriotic virtue 80; psyche 38, 56, 80; Puritan values 56; Revolution 80; universalism and moral superiority, myths of 83; Way 84 A Nation at Risk 14, 84 arguments (making of) 68, 70, 118 Aróstegui, J. L. 36, 101–2 art for art’s sake 21–2, 87, 101, 114 Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education (OECD) 17, 34, 101 artificial intelligence 6, 98 arts and humanities 2, 5, 14, 22, 28, 68, 73–4, 99 assimilation 84 Atwood, M. 46–7, 56–7

Auschwitz 79 Australia viii Austria x authoritarianism x, 11n6, 33–4, 59, 112, 114 autonomy: musical 84; national 84–5; personal 35, 71 Barthes, R. 32 Baker, G. 40 Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony 37 Bloom, A. 120 Bourdieu, P. 1 Bowman, W. 40, 46, 123n branding 47, 54, 62n65 Brexit referendum viii, 4, 87, 94, 96 Britain x, 14, 38, 83; see also England and United Kingdom British Empire 62n56 Buchanan, P. 94 bullshit 86, 93–5; bullshit artist 86, 92 Bush, G. H. W. 14, 50, 103 Bush, G. W. 9, 87 Cameron, D. 4, 16, 110 Canada viii, 15, 19, 46–63, 69 capitalism 2, 14–16, 19–21, 34, 36, 59, 72–3, 79, 111, 114, 116; disaster 20 Castiglione, B. 54–5 Central and South America 81 Chilcot Report from the Iraq Inquiry Committee 88 China viii, 82, 89n25, 90n39 Chomsky, N. 19, 21, 39, 80

140 Index

civil rights movement 50 classical music 51 Clinton, H. 50, 93, 96 Clinton, W. 14, 50 Cold War 82, 84, 87, 105n16 College Music Society Report of the Task Force on the Undergraduate Music Major 66 commodification 51, 79 commodity fetishization 79, 117 communism viii, ix, 5 competition 5, 20, 73, 98, 100, 104 composition 37, 66 computerization 7–9 conformity 68, 73, 104 connoisseurship 114 consciousness 22–3, 40, 57, 87, 117, 119; false 85 conservatives 3–4, 23, 30, 38, 40, 46–63; see also neoconservativism creativity 24, 47, 58, 65, 69, 73, 101–2, 114 critical awareness 10 critical inquiry viii critical thinking 2–3, 8, 17–20, 22–3, 57, 65, 69, 102, 119 criticism, direct vs. indirect 36–7, 40, 114, 116 cultural appropriation 79; colonialism 85; elites 54; hegemony 79; homogeneity 52; memory, 37; stereotypes, negative 83; wealth 104, 111, 116 culture 51, 111–12; of fear 53, 117; of the market 70; of timidity 40–1, 117; popular vii; taming of 58 democracy vii–xiii, x–xi, 22, 38, 85, 94, 114; liberal ix, 110–11, 116, 118; social xi, 2, 111 Democracy and Music Education ix, 28, 35–6 democratic capitalism 20, 29–30, 41, 93, 98 democratic citizenship vii, 22–4, 28–31, 33–8, 68, 87, 98, 113, 115, 117, 120; justice-oriented citizen 31, 39; participatory citizen 31, 39; personally responsible citizen 30 democratic socialism xi, 2, 111 de Montaigne, M. 104n7 Dewey, J. viii, ix, 3, 11, 18, 20, 24, 31–33, 36, 39, 46, 56–7, 74, 80, 82, 87, 94, 111–15, 117 dictatorship 47 digitization 7, 9, 98 discipline 8, 100 disinformation 87 Disney 78 dissimulation 54–5; musical 54

economy 7, 20, 24, 47–8, 53, 93, 96, 100, 102–4, 112 education, liberal xi, 72, 110–20 educational fairness 104 efficiency 20 elites 46–7, 52–9, 68, 80, 93, 96, 115 Elliott, D. J. 36, 38, 39, 40–1, 58 empathy 8 End of History, The 73, 92–93 England 16, 96, 116; see also United Kingdom and Britain entertainment 11, 16, 29–30, 52, 85, 87, 98 equality 117 equity 117 Estonian Singing Revolution 18 ethical evaluation 58; self-reflection 8, 30, 36, 39 ethics of persuasion 8 European Union 20, 87, 96, 100 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) 103, 108n68 excellence, lack of definition 69, 100 expertise 7, 54 experts 46–63, 93, 96, 114 fascism viii feminism 50–1 Finnish classrooms and teachers 67 France x, 96, 113 freedom 8, 28, 30–32, 67, 70, 74; artistic 24, 28, 31, 114–15 free trade 4, 20 23, 51, 96–7, 110 Freire, Paulo 18, 57, 78 Fukuyama, Francis ix, 93, 110 Giroux, H. 9, 20, 59, 78 globalization of higher education 110 Goble, S. 29, 41 Goldwater, B. 54, 94 Good Morning, Vietnam 78 government as moral tutor to the nation 52 Great Depression 20 Great Recession x, 5, 7, 15–16, 20, 116 Greece 16 Green, L. 6 Greene, M. 74, 113, 121n20 Hamilton viii, 113, 115 Handmaid’s Tale, The 56–7 Harper, S. 4, 31, 46–63, 93, 111 hidden curriculum 21, 36 Higney, J. 61–2n65 historical knowledge as set of critical tools 31, 33, 37 history 1–4, 19, 31, 33, 46, 57, 81, 83

Index 141

Hitler, A. 18, 21 Hong Kong viii Howard, V. 56 Huckabee, M. 100 Hurricane Katrina 20 Huxley, A. 10 identity 6, 38, 47, 49, 77, 80–1, 95; national 80 illusion, music as 119 imagination 8, 24, 41, 53, 56, 73, 101–2, 112, 115, 119 immigration 4; illegal 94–6, 106 improvisation 37, 66 inclusivity 31 indigenous peoples 81, 85 indoctrination 3, 18, 21, 30, 98 inequality, economic 78 Ingraham, L. 54, 115 inquiry 23 intention 8 isolationism, professional 40, 116 James, W. 94 Jones, P. 6 Jorgensen, E. 76n55, 122n49 justice 1; see also social justice Just Society 32 Kanellopoulos, P. A. 43n40 Keynes, J. M. 20, 31 Kertz-Welzel, A. 122n49 Keynesian welfare state 31, 48, 51 Le Pen, Marine 113 liberals 23, 49 Ma, Y. Y. 55 Machiavelli, N. 4, 55, 94 Madison, J. 39, 45n68 Manifest Destiny 81 manipulation 8, 79, 83, 101 Mapplethorpe, R. 51 McLuhan, M. 11 measurement 23, 69; see also quantitative; of economic impacts of music education 20 media vii, 4, 10, 47, 67, 83–8, 92–9, 119 methodology 69 methods 58, 65, 67 Middle East ix–x, 81 misappropriation, musical 52 modernity 73 moral agency 2, 8, 18, 37, 58, 115; character 28; imagination 113; judgements 119;

obligation 78; reprobation 52; responsibilities, 35; witnessing 8, 59 multiculturalism 111; music education 111, 116–17 Mursell, J. 64 music and musicians, African 66 music education as aesthetic education 84 Music Educators National Conference (NAfME) 84, 100–2 music for music’s sake 17, 21 musicians and artists as moral prophets 115; see also prophetic function of the arts musicking 32–3 music’s intrusion into the news 85 Muslims viii, 95 myths xi, 3, 19, 34, 38, 50, 58, 83 National Anthem Project 84 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) 17 National Education Association (US) 99 national education standards 2, 64, 67 National Endowment for the Arts 51 national security 14, 52 National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 22, 28 neoconservatism ix, x, 4, 47–63, 93, 111 neoliberalism ix, x, 4–5, 7, 9, 46, 51–63, 67, 70–3, 93, 96, 103 neoliberal New Public Management (NPM) 5 neoliberal takeover of education 9, 20, 39, 67, 98 Newsroom, The 3 Nietzsche, F. 86, 110 Nixon, R. 50, 54 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) 16, 98, 103, 106n43 Nussbaum, M. 34 Obama, B. 50, 101, 110, 112 objectivity 21, 23, 67, 94, 103, 119 opera 15 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ix, 4, 6, 17, 20–21, 34, 97, 100–1, 120n6 orthodoxy xi, 38 Orwell, G. xi–xii, 1–4, 10, 14, 21, 28–9, 35, 39, 46, 56, 64, 92, 120 outcome-based education 2, 22–3, 34, 69, 72, 100 outsourcing of American music jobs 97–8 pacification of the colonized 83–4 parental choice 98 patriotic music and art 81–2

142 Index

patriotism 39, 50 Pence, M. 113, 115 perception management 84–85 persuasion xi, 6–8, 36, 54 Pierce, C. S. 94 Plato 114, 119 political neutrality of schools, myth of the xii, 2, 18–19, 21, 29, 39, 40, 58, 117 politics of denial 29, 79 Popeye the Sailor xi, 77, 81–3, 93 popular culture vii; music 48–9, 51, 66, 78, 116 populism viii, x, 87, 96, 111, 117 Portugal 16 Postman, N. 3, 85 pragmatism 94, 119 propaganda 8, 38, 118; capitalist 19, 72, 83, 87; government 81–3; leftist 8, 30, 42n10, 79, 80, 87; Nazi 18, 21, 38; neoconservative and neoliberal 10; patriotic 79 prophetic function of the arts 37, 56; see also musicians as moral prophets public good 111 Putin, V. vii qualitative assessment 102–3 quantitative measurement 17, 101–3 reality 2–4, 87, 94 Reagan, R. 9, 50, 52, 54, 67, 101, 117 religious right 3, 19 Republican Party 4 Romney, M. 50 Ross, A. 115 Rusinek, G. 36 Scandinavia 19 self-determination 68 Shepherd, J. 40 Silverman, M. 38–9 sincerity 95 Small, C. 8, 32 social category of youth 72–3 social justice 31, 78, 87, 117 social mobility 19 social responsibility 8, 31 socio-musical relationships 3, 8, 29, 32–3 Socratic and Aristotelian virtues 29 Socratic questioning 81

soft power vii, 84 Soviet Socialist Realism 80 Soviet Union ix, 19, 38, 93, 110 Spain 16 standardized curricula 34, 58, 64, 66, 74, 102–4 standardized testing viii, 7, 18, 20, 34, 64, 67, 70, 98, 100–4, 107n52 STEM subjects 16, 22–3, 101 Strauss, L. 55 subjectivity of music and the arts 22, 30, 101, 103 technology 4, 10, 97–8 Thatcher, M. 51, 67, 72, 101, 117 totalitarianism xi, 5, 19, 38 totalizing productivity 9 transfer of skills 6, 17, 65 Trudeau, J. 4, 49 Trudeau, P. E. 32, 47, 49 Trump, D. vii–viii, x–xi, 4, 9, 11, 50, 52, 56–7, 59, 86–7, 92–104, 110–13, 115–16: Trump Effect 96 truth viii, ix–xii, 1–4, 8, 10, 19, 29, 33, 58, 78–9, 83–8, 92–5, 102, 112, 118–20 Tyler, R. 65 tyranny 79; of perceptions 94–5 Twain, M. 77 United Kingdom x, 94–5; see also England and Britain United States viii, x, 3, 14–16, 19, 32, 49, 57, 67–8, 79–87, 92, 96–7, 103 universal child nature 65 Venezuelan El Sistema orchestra program 40; see also Baker, G. Venice Architectural Biennale 78 virtuality 4, 86, 94–96 vocational training 34, 58, 67, 72 Welsh, J. x, 110–11, 118 West, C. x, 3, 81 World Bank ix, 20, 110 world music 79 World Trade Organization (WTO) ix, 20, 110 World Values Surveys x World War Two 19–20, 37, 80, 82