XVI Colloquium: July 12 - 19, 2005:
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
"Discourses and Practices of Hegemony, Power, and Exclusion in Music Education"

Music Education at the Tipping Point
John Kratus
Michigan State University

The title of this paper refers to the book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown, 2000). Gladwell's thesis is that small changes and events can accumulate and have the potential to cause rapid, large-scale transformations, once a critical mass, or tipping point, has been reached. He uses the analogy of an epidemic, which begins with a few instances of the disease and, under the right circumstances, can spread by geometric propagation throughout a population. In this paper I turn Gladwell's lens toward music education and conclude that a tipping point in the viability of school-based music education has already been reached. In this paper I provide evidence for this contention, examine its causes, and suggest a means for initiating a counter epidemic.

Examples of sharp, swift cutbacks in music education programs can be found around the world. Perhaps the clearest example of this occurred in California between 1999 and 2004 when the number of students enrolled in music classes decreased by 500,000, the percentage of students participating in school music was halved, and the number of music teachers employed by California public schools decreased by 26%. All of this occurred while student enrollment in California schools increased by over 5% and while enrollment in art, dance, and theater classes also increased.

Supporters of music education blame California's downturn on a crisis in State finances, on implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and on the public's devaluing of arts education during difficult times. Each of these factors may have contributed to California's tipping point, but neither explains why music was hit disproportionately to other arts and other elective school subjects. Furthermore, a large school system run by the U.S. Department of Defense, which has no budget crisis and is exempt from NCLB provisions, also faced a 50% decline in secondary music participation during the same period as California's decline. Clearly there are deeper, underlying causes for the rapid decline of music education in these cases.

The two factors that I believe are at the heart of the matter are the nature of music experience and the nature of music education practices. In both cases music education has become isolated from the prevailing culture. Out-of-school music experience satisfies people's emotional needs; is individualistic; makes use of technology to connect mavens across distances; is primarily non-classical; deemphasizes one-shot, formal concert attendance; is often homemade; and makes wide use of guitar and keyboard, allowing for a lifetime of musical involvement. In-school music satisfies teachers' curricular needs; is large-group oriented; makes little use of technology to connect students to others; is primarily classically-based; emphasizes one-shot concerts; is usually composed by others; and makes limited use of guitar and keyboard, instead focusing on instruments that restrict musical involvement after graduation.

Music education practices have also become disassociated from educational practices in other disciplines. Other school subjects have come to terms with the cognitive revolution. Children learning to use language, for example, learn to read from authentic sources such as newspapers and books as soon as possible. Young elementary children are encouraged to write and publish their own books, fostering a community of independently functioning readers and writers. In most schools language is taught contextually, not as a series of sequential exercises. By contrast, many of our music education practices take students through a plodding step-by-step approach, dominated by the teacher, and leading toward an end state that is anything but an independently functioning musician.

In summary, what it happening in school music education and what is happening in music and in education elsewhere in the world are on two divergent paths. The underlying causes for California's downturn exist elsewhere. Therefore, I contend that the long-term problems of music education will not be fixed through improved advocacy of the status quo. Before promoting a new music education epidemic, the product needs to be reformulated, and this reformulation will almost certainly not come in the form of a new national curriculum or national standards.

Using Gladwell's terms, music education needs to become sticky, that is it must become potent and irresistible. It must also connect to the culture in meaningful ways to enable the epidemic to spread. There must be mavens to initiate the change, connectors to transmit the change to a broader population, and salesmen (and women) to translate the change into each school's own context.

The paper concludes with examples of existing music programs that meet Gladwell's criteria for initiating large-scale change: the ukulele movement in New Zealand schools, the Metropolitan Opera Company's Creating Original Opera program, and the Vermont MIDI Project connecting students with professional composers via the internet. None of these ideas would work everywhere. But all of them have worked somewhere and could work elsewhere.

To initiate an epidemic in music education would require: (a) passionate, creative people to initiate an idea, well-connected people to communicate the idea, and music educators to apply the idea in their classrooms, (b) a testing program to determine in advance whether the idea is transferable to other school settings, and (c) the belief that change can occur.