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In the twenty-first century, society will be
marked by change, complexity, creative innovation, and continental
interdependence. Demographic shifts and the move from the Industrial
Age to the Information Age have triggered trends and issues of
places and people. The traditional physical settings of home,
school, community, and workplace have become varied and are identified
differently. Home, literally where "one hangs his or her
hat," is characterized by more mobility and multiple locations,
especially in the case of bicoastal marriages, and is a circumstance
that is increasingly more prevalent. On the more adverse side
are the "homeless" people, recognized by transience
and rootlessness. Today there are public, private, home, charter,
and magnet schools with the time of school varying according to
the settings in which they occur. The workday has become a twenty-four-hour,
seven-day-a-week situation aided by technological advances. Families
and communities have also undergone changes and new definitions.
Besides the traditional family structure, family units now consist
of multiple adults, single parents (either gender), and extended
families. In many ways, the traditional family is now the nontraditional
family.
With all of these relationships at work in our
society, a causal effect of interdependence is developing, and
yet there is a great need for self-actualization and individualization—a
desire for personal choices and space, learning styles, and preferences.
More and more, institutional structures are embracing collaborations
and partnerships. Business and industry, government, education,
community organization and agencies, and professional service
organizations (health and medical) are developing programs designed
to benefit one another collectively and at the same time to have
greater impact in the communities of which they are a part.
As a consequence of all of these changing environments
and relationships, the music teaching profession must give a new
meaning to a place called school and view it as a process called
education. We need to expand the focus of music education to include
all ages (from early childhood through adulthood) and all settings.
At the same time, we need to increase access to quality music
instruction for all members of society and celebrate cultural
differences and similarities. How do we create programs that draw
teachers from broader backgrounds, representing the students of
diverse cultures—welcoming them into the profession? How
do we maintain high standards and excellence in teaching? As the
world community shrinks, music education will need to broaden
its perspective and revitalize and restructure its teaching methods,
curricula, and teacher-training procedures.
In view of demographic indicators discussed herein,
which forecast a huge minority population explosion and its numerical
dominance in the next millennium, the greatest challenge to America
is not in the arts; the greatest challenge to America is to provide
a superior education and equal access to it, as well as equal
job opportunities with fair employment and housing practices,
so that economic prosperity is also, on balance, spread among
all of its hard-working and deserving citizens, regardless of
race or ethnicity, age, or gender. If America were to live up
to the principles written in the Constitution, that actualization
would provide a society more complete and sophisticated than the
world has ever seen. To do this our collective efforts must be
directed: Will we learn from the lessons of the past (i.e., slavery
and the civil rights movement, the Holocaust, ethnic uprisings
in Bosnia and Kosovo, the apartheid in South Africa)? How will
we use the wonderful advances in technology to achieve our goals?
The basic question remains paramount: In the next millennium,
what can music education do to enhance its place in our educational
system and in the lives of America's vast and varied population?
How can we make certain that our long-established goals to educate
every person, regardless of age, gender, or race, will be realized?
It is becoming abundantly clear that the time
is past for more pronouncements, speeches, and expository and
exploratory scholarship centered on cultural diversity and multicultural
issues as they have an impact upon the American people and the
social institutions that influence our lives. Certainly there
has been more than enough said and written about these issues
in music education, in our accreditation agencies, in arts funding
organizations, in our national associations, and in the confer
ences and publications they provide.
The supporting businesses (the music industry)
that supply materials and equipment that we use in our profession
have made a wealth of related teaching tools available. As we
learn more about world music, we discover a wide array of instruments
to be used as tools for music making. We will need to include
knowledge and experiences with these in our music classrooms.
Technology is helping us redefine these tools, as well. Wind controllers,
samplers, synthesizers, and sequencers are examples of how this
is being done. Students who participate in computer based music
instruction are making more choices about what they use to invent
for musical examples. When they make those choices, there is ownership
in the curriculum and they discover through experiences that there
is more to learn and know about the subject in which they are
already interested. Music educators will need to become more knowledgeable
about what music students are choosing to listen to and use the
information to make their teaching and curriculum more relevant.
"Westernization" of the music of other cultures robs
them of their true character. With this understanding, creative
movement and improvisation therefore take on a new meaning and
will be elevated in importance in the curriculum of the future.
Now is the time to implement new strategies for restructuring
our curricular designs (infusing the National Standards), to reform
policies and practices, to improve and increase human resources,
and redefine/reorganize schedules to allow for a more accommodating
use of teaching time in the school day.
In order for the National Standards to enjoy
widespread use in our nation's schools, not only will curricula
require careful revision but music teaching schedules will need
skillful redesigning with realistic time allotments to allow for
the quality instruction required to aid the development of music
skills and understandings specified in the Standards. Music literacy
can never be achieved on a once-a-week (45-60 minutes) class schedule,
which is so often the case in our schools. The school year and
the school day will have to be redefined. Many districts are experimenting
with varied instructional formats (i.e., "early bird"
classes, evening sessions, summer opportunities, and year-round
schools).
Today a "one size fits all" mentality
does not work in designing school schedules. While a seven-or-eight-period
schedule is ineffective for some subjects, a four-period-only
schedule creates new problems for others. Flexibility in scheduling
seems to be the key, for it may be in the best interest for the
students and learning. We need to explore new forms of scheduling
as an opportunity to improve the school music program. For example,
without a common planning time, integrating music with other subjects
or classroom activities will occur sporadically and in all likelihood
be superfluous.
Early childhood and adult music education will
factor into that schedule. A recent issue of the Music Educators
Journal included a special focus titled Music and Early Childhood.45
That issue provides timely information regarding training to prepare
music educators to use music with young children; offers a list
of characteristics MENC recommends that early childhood music
teachers have; and lists model programs established in university
and community settings around the country. Emerging research suggesting
that children's early years are a key time for musical growth,
and considering that this population will constitute a large segment
of our society in the next millennium, indicates a growing concern
for how music teaching will be impacted in the future. Harriet
Hair states that research procedures with young children will
be greatly influenced by the rapidly changing computer technology.46
Therefore centers for research on the musical characteristics
of children should be established to provide electronic databases
that would be available to educators and researchers.
Community partnerships with music education to
provide for people of all ages may cause a relocation of "where
music teaching happens" and the forms it will take. Venues
may include churches, community music schools, after-school programs
in child- or day-care centers, and other social agencies such
as Boys and Girls Clubs and retirement centers.
In the United States, current and ongoing demographics
that affect the nation's cultural, social, religious and political
conditions mandate that curricular revisions across disciplines
in education are necessary in our nation's public and private
schools, colleges and universities. At the same time, sophisticated
telecommunications technology (including expanded global use of
cyberspace), rapid aerospace travel, geopolitical dynamics, increasing
transcontinental corporate presence, and universal changes in
ethical and moral values are all forms drawing the cultures of
the world together.47
The next millennium will be an exciting opportunity
for innovations and creative adaptation of teaching methodologies
and materials in music education. Indeed, the traditional cycle
by which music education achieves its leadership must be redefined.
It must begin with the training of teachers representative of
diverse cultures who will instruct our youth (also of diverse
cultures) and extend into music major programs in colleges and
universities. In this manner we will be presented with increased
opportunities to learn about music of the world's cultures even
as we teach the people of those cultures. Crosscultural fertilization
of musical ideas and traditions will surely take place in the
academy. Music education has the opportunity, indeed the responsibility,
to lead our nation in becoming a true democracy, where every person
learns to sing and play in harmony, dance with rhythmic grace,
and truly become an instrument of peace for the world's people.
Music really is a universal language . . . of, for, and by the
people.
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