XV Colloquium: June 10 - 12, 2004:
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
"Music for Life: Re-visioning Music Education as a Part of General/Comprehensive Schooling"

Rationales for leadership: The classroom music teacher in postmodern societies
OR
Maybe we've finally outlived Plato? Nah!
J Terry Gates

Rather than discuss content very much, I did some re-visioning of the role of the musicians who work in elementary, secondary, and tertiary schools and in the communities that support these schools. Music teacher educators have a leadership-development role to play in this, and we're all in it together.

My premise was that, as a group, classroom music teachers [all those whose students are "non-music majors"] do not appreciate the power they have – or deliberately deny its presence – and nd therefore, also as a group, have become reluctant to act as the agents of their own efficacy. Classroom music teachers have power that they have inherited from the past without knowing it, and their reach into people's lives is more extensive than is currently appreciated.

I examined three rationales for classroom music teacher leadership: 1] a historical overview suggests that we inherit great weight and the power for music teaching; 2] music teacher identity issues can be confronted by starting as early as elementary school to develop teaching abilities in young musicians; and 3] the concept of "public musical health" provides a policy base for exerting community leadership for music in the general education (and musical lives) of the general population. Finally, to provide a narrative for exerting leadership for improved musical lives of communities, I extended Alan Merriam's Ten Functions of Music in Societies as a framework for policy and planning discussions with other musical leaders about caring for and improving the public musical health [Merriam, A. (1964). The anthropology of music. Chicago: Northwestern University Press].