I’M SORRY IF I’M BEING GLOOMY. ACTUALLY, NO I’M NOT

Graham Meale, November 2003

A few months ago a seasoned Ictoasa reader told me that some of my articles had become rather gloomy. She seemed to think that perhaps I wasn’t enjoying teaching any more, and perhaps I should give it away and become an international restaurant critic, or a mattress tester or something. (Actually, I’ve always had a secret desire to be the man in the satellite who takes the cloud photos — surely one of the least stressful jobs in existence?)

But I disappointed her. For the record, I have never been happier. This year I can honestly say that I enjoy walking into every class. What frustrates me, as it always has, is having to apologise so often. Apologising for taking two periods to get around to helping someone in a class of thirty with their composition. Apologising for not having an answer when a kid asks me how to play a Bb minor chord on a guitar. Apologising for sending kids out under a tree in the rain because we don’t have enough practice rooms. Apologising for only having the hardware and software to enable one kid at a time to use technology to compose music. Apologising for making a class do quiet bookwork late in the afternoon because seven periods in a row of Year 7 practical have given me a mega-headache. Apologising to elective classes for having to fly through theory concepts at breakneck speed because we have so little time in the curriculum for our subject. Apologising for various timetabling problems every year because music is always bottom of the pecking order. And apologising for the fact that there are so few music camps for kids to enjoy, and that the ones that do still happen are $300 or more.

It saddens me that there are so many compromises that we have to make, and I often wonder why music teachers as a group seem incapable or unwilling to fight to improve things. There is so much evidence now that things have deteriorated in the last couple of decades, just as there are now volumes of research proving beyond doubt the value of music education, not just in its own right, but as a fillip to success in other areas. It saddens me that governments still scratch their heads at the increasing levels of boredom-induced crime and teenage suicide while music education in schools is treated so shabbily.

It would appear that the only issue that historically has been sufficient to galvanise us enough to get off our collective backsides is the threat of abolishing the mandatory hundred hours of secondary music education. I said in the last issue that the Stevens report indicated that New South Wales is one of only two states that has any mandatory secondary music education at all, but on closer reading it appears that we are in fact the only state. No wonder that every few years there are rumblings that it will go. My bet is that, certainly within the next decade, probably sooner, the requirement will become one hundred hours of each of a creative art and a performing art. Schools that struggle to get music teachers will then reduce music to fifty hours or abolish it altogether. My crystal ball is showing, quite vividly, a Memorandum to Principals: Guidelines for Redeploying & Retraining Music Staffs. Perhaps many of us are quietly hoping that we get to retirement age before it happens.

But I’m being gloomy again. Why don’t I let other people be gloomy for me? People have sent me clippings from newspapers and magazines, or directed me to documents on the web, for which I am grateful, but which for copyright reasons I am unable to reproduce in full here. Some of the web documents I have put on our website’s links page, but here are a few selective quotes that have come to my attention in recent months, and which I’d like to share with you. Warning: the following contains explicit material that may depress some readers. If you belong to the culture of denial, stop reading now.

“There are signs looming largely and ominously that we must not ignore,” according to Australia’s foremost music educator, Richard Gill. In a keynote address to the Orchestras Alive conference a year ago, he said “the current status of music education is reflected in the national trend towards integrated arts in the primary school system taught in the main by willing and earnest teachers who are strong on sincerity and short on certitude.” He went on to say that “the integrated arts approach is the most abhorrent betrayal of all the art forms and a betrayal of the children who are supposed to study such an approach, a betrayal of those who devise and administer the approach and a complete dumbing-down of serious artistic information at all levels. That we have sunk to this type of mediocrity in our school system will remain one of our great shames.”

“Music education is frequently in the hands of musically untrained administrators who, through no fault of their own, have responsibility for whole ‘integrated arts’ areas and who in fact have no business dealing with any sort of musical activity whatsoever.”

Gill is only too aware of the magnitude of the problem. “Music education is not on the political radar of federal or state governments and active musicians are frequently too busy to be engaged in serious lobbying,” he states. “The situation is serious. Warm fuzzy feelings, fun-filled transient musical moments and the overwhelming worship of recency, relevancy and outcomes-based teaching, appealing to imperceptive adults, teachers, parents and administrators alike, exist in abundance all over this country, negating the truly good and wonderful work being done by people who genuinely know the subject and how to teach it. Many politicians and bureaucrats believe that music education is what takes place in the form of arena entertainments provided annually in most states. This populist and popularist form of entertainment is eroding and devouring the serious music traditions leading teachers and children to believe that performing music (often badly), from the current music theatre repertoire or singing pop songs in the manner of under-developed cabaret artists with spectacular lighting effects, dancers and amplified sound, constitutes a manifestation of serious music education.”

So what needs to be done? In the Sydney Morning Herald of July 9, Gill said: “If every child in a state school was taught music from kindergarten, by a specialist, by the time they got to sixth grade they could easily attempt the current higher school certificate music syllabus.” He describes teaching music to kindergarten kids as one of the most exciting things in the world. “Everything is interesting to a kindergarten child. There are no biases, no prejudices, no attitudes.”

Gill is by no means alone in his recognition of the need for trained music specialists in primary schools. Outgoing president of ASME, Dr Bob Smith, said in an article in the August 2003 Music Forum: “No doubt most of those of us who have serious concerns about music education regard the appointment of music specialists to all schools as a necessity.” But proper training is essential. “The training of music specialists in Australian tertiary institutions must also be an area for our concern. For every potentially competent new music educator there are simply too many who don’t match up to the reality and expectations of classroom music education settings.”

If primary kids as a whole are being short-changed in regard to music education, imagine how those who come from musical families must feel. In a paper delivered to a national conference in 2000, Dr Felicia Chadwick of the University of Newcastle looked at research that examined the plight of these kids. She stated that “the notion that musically able and experienced primary-aged children should be taught by teachers musically less experienced or well informed than them, would not sit comfortably in any other field of endeavour.” She went on to say that parents of these kids “are well aware of the challenges and dilemmas facing school-based music educators, particularly those located in state government secondary schools.” Such kids usually vote with their feet and go to private or specialist schools, their parents commenting on the “anti-musical” culture in most state schools, and the fact that experienced students “do receive a lot of jeering from their peers”. Chadwick concludes that “the undervaluing of the arts in society has contributed significantly to the reduced status of school-based music education. It appears that the challenge of effectively disciplining and managing large groups of disinterested [sic] adolescents in music classrooms, is only being met by activities which serve to entertain rather than educate secondary school students.”

The artistic director of the Sydney Youth Orchestra and freelance conductor Tom Woods sees little value in school music education in its present form. “Understand this. The professional musicians in Australia are not a product of a state education system; they are the product of private instrumental teachers,” he wrote in the February 2000 Music Forum. “Australian musicians become musicians despite the system. If all music in schools was abruptly ceased now, the number of new professionals joining the ranks would not change in the slightest.” He advocates the use of instrumental music teachers in schools, describing the current mandatory hundred hours of classroom music as a complete waste of time. “Without the development of skills and aptitudes at a younger age there is little appreciation that can take place. It is rather like teaching literature in a foreign language without learning the language first.”

Another name that keeps coming up in the push to improve school music education is Dr Anne Lierse. A classroom and instrumental music teacher at Melbourne High School, she has taught at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, has been involved in curriculum research and development with the Board of Studies and has had various papers published including Music in Schools in the Twenty-First Century: An Endangered Species? This 1997 source was cited by federal MP Chris Pearce in his motion to parliament on February 10 this year, in which he said “firstly, 48 percent of [Victorian] secondary schools [have] cut or reduced their classroom music programs because of the crowded curriculum; and secondly, an increasing number of schools [are] moving the emphasis on music education from the classroom to the extra-curriculum area.”

In a recent paper, accessible through the links page of our website, A Postcard from Victoria: can we really call this music education? Lierse says: “One can only speculate on the potential waste of talent which will never be developed due to the lack of resources in many of our government schools. Reports from a number of major studies reveal the sorry state of music education in government schools. Each study found that there were serious problems with provision and resourcing of music programs. What is most interesting is that each report concluded with lists of the benefits of a music education to the child and a very similar list of recommendations.”

But perhaps the greatest challenge for musicians is speaking as one. Says Gill, “In this country at the moment we have too many music associations, well intentioned though they might be, working against a common goal and working independently to try to justify their existence, in an effort to boost numbers to attend their workshops and clinics and the like. In this sense they tend to look inwardly for solutions rather than outwardly at the greater and more serious musical condition. There is a need for a united front.” Smith concurs. “I plead that we cease sniping at each other as individuals and as organisations and that we continue to develop the unified approach needed to effectively address the very serious issue of lack of status for the arts and in particular music education in Australia.”

The last word should go to the late American educationalist Charles Fowler, in his 1996 book Strong Arts, Strong Schools: “A downtrodden army of cultureless children is marching toward a barren and depleted adulthood and taking the future of our civilisation with them.”

I’m sorry if I’ve been gloomy.

© North Coast Region Music Teachers Association