Higher Status for Music Education
Mandate and Cultural Change Will Boost Music in Australian Schools
Every Australian school student should have an effective music education. But certain major steps must be taken to give music in schools much higher priority.
A National Review of Music Education in Schools and a National Music Workshop, under the auspices of the former Australian Government, made it clear that music education is essential to realise the full potential of each person. Many Australians hope the new government under Kevin Rudd will act on the findings. One of the first steps it must take is to build a much higher status for music education among educators and the general community.
Make Music Education Mandatory
The sine qua non for giving music in Australian schools its due status is to ensure that it is compulsory for all children in all primary and junior secondary schools to participate in a continuous, sequential and developmental program of music education. The Council of Australian Governments, which has been doing the groundwork in setting a core of learning areas in a proposed National Curriculum, therefore must include music in the core for all school systems.
The Education Minister must then instruct the National Curriculum Board to design a framework for school music education. In doing so, the Australian Government would be following one of the strongest recommendations of its 2020 Summit, and also acting in line with decisions of the February 2008 report of the Cultural Ministers Council.
Music to Be a Distinct Core Learning Area
Around the early 1990s curriculum changes lumped school music education together with other studies like visual arts, dance, drama, media studies in a single learning area called “The Arts”. The result was a disaster. Each of these valuable disciplines deals with skills, concepts and methodology utterly foreign to those of the other “arts”.
All were compelled to share the same language and format for programming, assessing and reporting. Worse still, each of the arts – in primary schools especially – lost its distinctness as a discipline and so lost status in the eyes of all. The Arts became a very blurred, meaningless area in the student’s report.
An allied fact of life in Australia is that music teachers are seen by many primary schools as essentially a means of providing general classroom teachers with their quota of “pupil-free” time each week. This, coupled with the “Mickey Mouse” curricular image of music education, tends to lower the professional status of music teachers in the eyes of many principals, colleagues and parents. Now music education must be established as a distinct and vital area of school learning in its own right.
Australian Culture Needs Change
To a certain extent the low status of music education in schools is a reflection of traditional Australian culture. The stereotypical Oz view of life reveres both sporting prowess and material success. Use of elevated language and interest in the abstract, imaginative and aesthetic are deeply suspect and often derided.
Such cultural traits impede attempts to win acceptance for music in a core school curriculum. Perhaps this is why so many proponents emphasise certain aspects of music like its usefulness in improving academic progress in basic literacy and numeracy, or its ability to develop “creativity” to the benefit of the nation’s industrial and commercial sectors.
In recent years a few groups have made splendid efforts to change community attitudes and understanding of music. The Music Council of Australia through its Music.Play for Life campaign, is perhaps the most outstanding of these. This superbly promoted and coordinated project has raised Australia’s awareness of the manifold virtues of music in schools and in everyday life.
A National Day of Music
As part of the MCA campaign in 2007 more than 200 000 students in over 850 primary schools across the Australian continent learnt a song especially written to encourage joyful participation in singing. On August 30th in their respective schools they all sang this same song at the same time. The event inspired many teachers and students and also achieved considerable media coverage.
An extension of the idea could provide a means for raising the status of music-making across the whole community, including schools. The Music Monday concept, which originated in Canada would be an excellent model to begin with. It would take music from schools out into the community in live performances culminating in a simultaneous performance of the same item. The National Music Workshop Report recommends to the Australian Government that such an event should be made an annual institution across the whole country.
So for many reasons the campaign for music must continue and reach more people in the Australian community. In view of the research evidence now available to show the importance of music to human development , societies and economies, its current status in schools is unacceptable.
