In the past 8 years, I can recall at least 5 seminars given to the staff of the schools I had worked for that emphasized the need to prepare students to be flexible in their learning for the world ahead. The point is made over and over that with the constant change in technology, that students need to not only learn the material we are teaching them now, but learn how become independent learners, in order to adapt.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I feel that one of the ways we have traditionally failed our students in every discipline is by treating them as memory storage devices that store information and spit it back out, rather than teach them how to learn and think.
And I believe strongly that this is where the need for music education in our schools has become more important today than perhaps any other time.
Yes, music fires the brain in ways nothing else does. Yes, music ties all of the core subjects together. Yes, music connects us in a spiritual way that few other things can. The problem with these statements, however, is that they miss what I think we are losing in our school systems, but we have always had in the music classroom: We teach how to learn a skill.
What subject does this anymore? Here's the ones that do: The Arts (including Industrial Arts, if you can find them), and Physical Education. For most of the others, the focus has become how to FIND the information you're looking for. In fact, at another one of those inservices in another district, we were told that students of tomorrow no longer need to memorize equations, facts, and theories because they are easily available on their phones and devices.
There's no shortcut to learning how to do music. Sure, there's tools to make music in different ways. There are videos you can look up how to play a certain song. There's apps to help you practice your skills. But YOU still have to do the work; the repetitive, often boring & frustrating, work that with a bit of resiliency, eventually pays off.
Many years ago, I had a revelation. I was telling my students to go home and practice, then becoming frustrated when they were coming back to class, and it was obvious that they had not in fact practiced. So I decided to take time in class to MAKE them practice in small groups while I observed and moved around to assist, and I fully realized my failure: They didn't know how! I had failed to prepare them with the basic skills of HOW to practice!
Soon after, I took a job that was primarily teaching Middle School General Music, but I was given full latitude on what I wanted to teach. There was no textbooks, no expectation of a traditional general music curriculum, but there WERE 32 guitars in the room. Students were placed into the class at random (there were no elective classes), with some having guitar experience, and others having none. With that class, and the Ukulele Class that I started soon after, I created my three goals for the class:
1. To teach them that they already loved music
2. To teach them how to practice a skill - ANY skill
3. To teach them that they COULD do music
These students were stuck in my class for 9 weeks, whether they liked or not. I told them: You're stuck in here; might as well learn something! When parents showed up on Curriculum night expecting to hear about a music class, they were told that my class wasn't really about music. It was about how to learn a skill. I know that the vast majority of the students in my room will not be professional musicians. Most of them may not even be amateur musicians. But every single one of them will need to learn how to learn a new skill at some time in their lives, and understand that they CAN learn something that's completely foreign to them, provided they take the necessary steps to learn them. Suddenly, a roomful of parents who knew for a fact that my class was going to be irrelevant to their child because they already knew in 7th grade that they were going to be an engineer, sat up and took notice and started to pay closer attention.
Every year, I have some students return to show me what they've continued to do with the skills I taught them, and those are the best moments in my teaching career.
So in all of our passion for the spiritual aspects of our craft, the full belief that music can be of benefit to the community and every student, don't forget one of the more mundane aspects of our art. We teach them how to work, and how to learn. Never discount the importance of that.