Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth

Paul G. Woodford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138322820
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429837708
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

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.

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

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!

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 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 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, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Why I Write
• 2. It’s the economy, stupid
• 3. Whose democracy, and what kind of citizen?
• 4. Harperland and conservative disdain for music and the arts
• 5. The defeat of the schools
• 6. I Yam What I Yam
• 7. On The End of History and the global decline of music education?
• 8. On The Return of History: Toward a liberal music education
• Bibliography
• Index