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CoreyWhittSecondEssay 4 - 30 May 2022 - Main.EbenMoglen
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JCPenney, the Saxophone, and Advocating for Music Education | | | The Decay of Music Education in American Schools | |
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< | The American educational landscape of today has diminished the reach of such musical experiences in students' lives, where legislatures, boards of education, and the public have deemed it “nice but not necessary.” The decline of music education has been on a steady march for the better part of four decades, with the National Endowment for the Arts placing the number of adults, ages 18 to 24, who participated in music classes, down by over one-third – only 34 percent of individuals engage in music coursework during their compulsory education. Today more than 1.3 million elementary school students do not receive a music education, less than one-fifth of students in eighth-grade perform in a school ensemble, and high school music opportunities are relegated to the demands of high-stakes testing regimes and Advanced Placement coursework. | >
> | The American educational landscape of today has diminished the reach of such musical experiences in students' lives, where legislatures, boards of education, and the public have deemed it “nice but not necessary.” The decline of music education has been on a steady march for the better part of four decades, with the National Endowment for the Arts placing the number of adults, ages 18 to 24, who participated in music classes, down by over one-third – only 34 percent of individuals engage in music coursework during their compulsory education. Today more than 1.3 million elementary school students do not receive a music education, less than one-fifth of students in eighth-grade perform in a school ensemble, and high school music opportunities are relegated to the demands of high-stakes testing regimes and Advanced Placement coursework. | | | The disparities yawn when comparing suburban music offerings for those in urban and rural areas, or the music education opportunities of white to non-white students. Large metropolitan districts are the least likely to supply robust music education programs, while music education advocacy is shallowest amongst rural administrators. In settings such as these, schools rely on district coffers to sustain music education programs, and find their resources already stretched thin, while affluent suburban communities draw the bulk of their funding from outside administrative channels. | | | NAfME? and Music Education Advocacy | |
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< | Today the national music education organization, the National Association for Music Education (NAfME? ), bangs the familiar doldrums that have permitted a music education to fade from our classroom: | >
> | Today the national music education organization, the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), bangs the familiar doldrums that have permitted a music education to fade from our classroom: | | | Music is math. | | | Music makes us a better people. | |
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There are four moving parts in this moving draft: memoir, proof of inequality of access, NAfME's mistaken defense, and the parade of beauties showing that music makes us better. Improving the draft means shaping these pieces to more harmonious scale. I think the inequality of access piece can be tightened substantially. That makes room for the real subject, which is the final theme, to be developed.
My brother and I were recently talking about an undergraduate 0-level course he would like to create, called "Literature Can Save Your Life." Like your real theme here, it's a reaction to the effort to justify the humanities instrumentally, as NAfME and so many other humanities organizations now do. Your draft can be strengthened by showing your subject in relation to the broader "crisis of the humanities." You are also speaking in the tradition of democratic education theory, by asking not only how the humanities makes us better—happier, more resilient and caring—humans, but also "a better people," a stronger society. That theme must be developed, not merely sounded.
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