Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: Gettin Ejecated
July 1st, 2008 | by Christopher Gillespie |
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S.M. Hutchens has a terrific post on teaching, modernism, and music eduction. He sees an irony that all of the modern eduction ideals haven’t been applied to music education. With music ed there is still right and wrong, good and bad, proper and improper. The teacher is still the authority and the path still fixed.
In a nice twist, he parallels this “traditional” style of teaching to the work of the midwife. Having had five children at home and the last two with midwives, the example resonates with me. The midwife is the “traditional” teacher of birth. She knows the right path but does not foist her mind upon the mother. She allows the mother-to-be to cultivate and find the growth of mind and soul needed to deliver a child. She is a mentor but not an lehrer.
Contrast this with hospital-physician birth where the mother is unknowing, untrained, and the one who needs to be treated. She is like the child in the modern school who has to be indoctrinated to the new wisdom of interventionalist birthing.
So too there is a real danger that we foist a singular method upon all our teaching, failing to recognize that our socialist education system has a dramatically different idea of what it means to be human. The ultimate aim of society is to be mechanically and economically productive. Each student must be conformed to the ideal of the workplace, for the gain of all society.
We as Christians have a different set of ideals. First, we desire the ultimate goal of heaven for our children and all those who we teach. Second, we desire that they learn wisdom and knowledge for the improvement of their neighbor and society. But here we truly depart from the modernist. Our concept of end of teaching is informed by Scripture, were simple economics are not touted as the highest gain of labor. Rather, the promotion of the sciences and art, order and justice, knowledge and wisdom is important. We do not expect each to carry proficiency in every field but rather that each would serve as a member in the larger body, individually and specifically. Some may have no skill in mathematics and yet be eloquent in words. Another may play and compose music withy grace but never understand the revolution of the planets.
Let me be clear: I am an advocate of liberal arts education. Every child should be exposed to the many disciplines of study. But grade-level proficiencies are counter-intuitive to reality of individuality and singular gifts. Inspire learning, guide, mentor, and teach. “The teacher does not create; he supervises, he draws out as one who is himself being drawn out. In this way, her serves the Creator in his work with the creature, but he can do no more.”
I’ll give you a brief excerpt below but I urge you to read the whole article.
Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: Gettin Ejecated
… Maieusis, the work of midwives, involves knowledge and opinion about the process and what its ends are. Those who practice it must understand what is normal and desirable, know error or anomaly, and take steps to correct it with as much force as is required to accomplish the right end. The teacher’s task, to be sure, is essentially that of a guide and encourager, but to do this he must know the path to be taken, and equally, what is not the path, and is to be discouraged. His knowledge of his subject is not to be imparted or simply transferred as much as put forward for the advantage of the learner–who is to make of it what he can, and may be examined by the master on that making, the examination, ideally, being for the master’s learning as well as the student’s.
Second, music, at least as it is still practiced in the preparatory schools, has not been much infected by its modernists. Like mathematics, it has right and wrong responses to what the notations propose. A B-flat is either in tune or not. The note or series played is the note or series written, or it is not. Pianissimo is softer–a lot softer, dang it–than mezzo-forte. If Sousa didn’t put a bump note at the end of the Trio, the person who isn’t paying attention and puts one there may never live it down. There are no feminists or deconstructionists or devotes of the twelve-tone scale–to my knowledge, saints preserve us–out there pooping on junior-high arrangements of the Pachelbel Canon or The British Eighth or excerpts from The Lion King. In this regard I assure my readers that Laura can, with a single well-placed glare, take out any of the “progressives” her groups may contain, for she will be working in a context where any advance on what is written is known by everyone present to be a mistake, and not only a mistake, but a mistake that makes everyone look bad.
On what pertains to mastery, the philosophy with which teachers’ trainers have been infected remains stolidly agnostic, so that they and their epigones find it difficult to guide the process of knowledge-birth, much less lay corrective hands upon it. The very idea of norms in processes or the ends they serve approaches obscenity in this guild. To express them is to expose oneself as a traditionalist or authoritarian–in the same sense a parent is when he insists on certain behavior toward certain well-defined ends for his children, and disciplines the child to the degree necessary to attain them. Sensing this, parents who love their children and desire the best for them (note the dogmatism, authoritarianism, and exclusivism contained in the very concept of “the best”!) are withdrawing them from schools where the teachers are trained by apes of the Zeitgeist.
As for my daughter, as a teacher of music she has two very great advantages over most of her academic colleagues. I hope she is able to take full advantage of both. First, she will be teaching elective classes, hence working with children who have expressed an interest in her subject. No one is forcing them to take band or orchestra: it may be assumed there is already a love of music present for her to increase, and with the increase of the love there will be an increase of its desires–she will be able to make them work hard at it and excel, if she manages things well.
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By C.G. on Jul 8, 2008
Having taught music for many years (children k-8), I can see the benefit for both ends of the spectrum.
Surely in the general classroom, the goal of the teacher should be to engender an appreciation and enjoyment of music without he strict right/wrong “grade level proficiencies” required by some programs. Learning through participation without the fear of judgement has a place here. Children learn that there can be an acceptance of a variety of skill levels working together for the joy of it all.
On the other hand, students who desire to learn the technical (right /wrong) side of music and develop proficiency should be given the opportunity through elective programs in band, choir, drama etc.
Both types of birthing have their place.
By Christopher Gillespie on Jul 9, 2008
C.G.,
Your response is a nice summary of what I was getting at. We’re not locked to proficiency standards but we also still hold to objective standards where proficiency is desirable.
Not everyone has to play piano but if you pursue it, there is still good-bad. Unfortunately many say either- no one needs piano and there is no good and bad playing, or the opposite- everyone must learn and there is only one way to play.