If Music Be Food For Citizenship (Part II)
If Aristotle is correct, then what should be the form of the state’s educational institutions? For Aristotle, the answer is a public educational system supervised by the state: private schools and local arrangements, such as home-schooling, should not be permitted. Furthermore, extra-circular activities also should be done in the public system, for education is not merely academic training for Aristotle but also the cultivation of habits with an eye towards excellence. In short, all pedagogical activities should be done and supervised in a public system.
Such a recommendation is not desirable in the United States, given its peculiar founding, government, and history. Education initially was a private affair; or if public, was controlled locally in this country. Also, the fact that most public schools arose in the United States to Americanize, i.e., Protestantize, Catholic and Jewish immigrants makes Aristotle’s case for an exclusive public education look more like state propaganda. Given the uniqueness of the American history, this specific recommendation of Aristotle would produce more backlash than benefit.
Of course, Aristotle himself recognized that different regimes required different forms of education given their unique founding, traditions, and history, so it is not inconceivable that Aristotle would accept private education in this country given the country’s peculiarities, especially when compared to Artistotle’s own time, such as the American federal, instead of unitary, state and America’s philosophy of liberalism rather than the political thought of the polis. But what we can learn from Aristotle that may be applicable to our regime is the notion that “Since there is a single end for the state, it is evident that education must be necessarily one and the same for all” (1337a23-26). In other words, national standards are crucial for any regime, if it wants to cultivate a common citizenship among its children. Theory aside, the reality is that the United States exist as a single entity in world politics and national standards of education are required if being a citizen of the federal republic will mean anything significant.
Legislation like No Child Left Behind is a step in the right direction. Like some people, I have grave reservations about the specifics in this law as well as its implementation and evaluation system, but the notion of a common national standard seems to follow the Aristotelian path, albeit for a large republic. If we truly want to promote a common citizenship among our populace, especially as our country becomes more pluralistic, then we need to revisit the notion of national standards, while allowing a plethora of ways for our children to reach them, in order for the continuity and preservation of our regime.
Being an advocate for national standards for education therefore does not necessarily translate into a national administration of such an education. Given the federal nature of our government and our tradition of local education, I would support a myriad of ways of educating our children according to national standards: public schools, private schools, and even home-schooling. Because of the size and diversity of our regime, it may be more harmful to implement a standardized administration of education rather than one that is sensitive to the peculiarities of certain local traditions. Still, national standards are required if we hope to create a sense of commonality in the citizenship for our children.
But what should be these national standards? Let me propose that music should be one of the core components. Now at first music may seem a strange subject to start with – wouldn’t mathematics, science, or rhetoric be a more suitable choice to begin? The utilitarian features of these disciplines are self-evident: everyone needs to read, write, and count to function in society, and science is especially prized in our society because we need it to manipulate nature for our greater material comfort. But what does music provide other than amusement of smiles and well-wishes? What value does music have in and of itself? And how does it relate to citizenship?
In the Politics, Aristotle lists music as one of the four things that children customarily learn (the other three are gymnastics, letters, and drawing), and it belongs to the sweetest of things of nature for them to learn (1337b23-28). Music not only provides a type of pleasure when we are at rest, but it habituates the soul accordingly to the mode performed, e.g., Phrygian harmonies make people inspired, Mixed Lydian produces a state of grief and apprehension. It renders the character of the soul a certain quality, as Aristotle states, and thus it should be left to the state to make sure that music’s imprint upon our children’s souls is good and proper instead of disorderly and vulgar.
But I would like to add something that Aristotle has neglected to mention about music: it also precedes rhetoric and mathematics in a child’s learning. Children respond to and, in a limited sense, understand music before they can read, write, and count. In other words, music is a child’s first encounter with thought. One of the reasons I suspect that music has been disregarded by most school districts – usually music is the first to be axed in school budget cuts – is that we see music through the lens of a tradition of emotionalism or romanticism instead of conceiving it as a mode of rational thought like mathematics or rhetoric. This is not to deny the emotional potency of music, but we should recognize its intellectual characteristics, too (I won’t even elaborate upon the relationship between music and other disciplines, such as music and mathematics or music and language, as these topics have been thoroughly explored elsewhere).5 It falls upon us to determine what type of thought we want our children to first encounter, and that first mode of thought is usually music, whether we recognize it or not.
The pedagogy of music in the United States suffers from the same problem as other subjects in this country: the absence of national standards. Unlike Great Britain or Canada, where national standards are established according to grade and ability, the United States has a plethora of standards for music reflecting its diverse educational system. Recently, educators in this country have been adopting national standards for music (based on the Canadian model), but progress has been slow and entirely voluntarily.
There is, however, a private organization that has national standards for music: the National Music Teacher Association (NMTA).6 For those who advocate national standards in education, they might have difficulty accepting a private organization providing these standards for musical education. But again, Aristotle may be receptive to the idea of a private organization providing national standards, given the peculiar nature of our regime where we have created considerable space for non-state institutions, such as private schools, to exist. What may matter more to someone like Aristotle is whether there is an agreed upon set national standards rather than from where they came.
According to NMTA, there are five areas in which the student must demonstrate competency: theory, ear training, sight reading, performance, and technical ability. A brief look at each category will show that music is as intellectually rigorous as the sciences and mathematics and as emotional in its persuasion as rhetoric and literature. Thus, the tradition in which music should be understood is one that is both intellectual and emotional as opposed to simply the latter.
Theory is the language of music: without it, one is illiterate. Of its many elements, the core features of theory are 1) rhythm: the ability to count time; 2) melody: the recognition of how time and sound proceed linearly; and 3) harmony: the understanding of the simultaneous combinations of sound and time. The underlying commonality to these elements is the ability to count time. In this sense, music resembles mathematics, except that it uses sound rather than numbers as the designation of how to count.
If theory resembles mathematics, ear training, sight reading, and performance are similar to rhetoric. The activities of listening, reading, and performing are the same for both music and rhetoric. In order to perform, the student needs technical skills, which is the fifth area of musical competency (rhetoric’s equivalent would be voice training for public speaking). Thus, the MTNA’s standards require students to count and to communicate in such a manner that are not only physically and mentally demanding but must also be done beautifully.
To these competencies, I would add content (which is implied in theory). To say whether composer X is superior to composer Z or why I like compositions A as opposed to B requires more than a technical understanding of theory or the abilities of close listening, sight reading, and performance. It also requires an understanding of the historical and social context of the composition or composer – something which only content and tradition can provide, and this helps make the student receptive to beauty. Aristotle thus seems to be correct when he says that music is not only the sweetest of things but it also leaves a permanent imprint on the child’s soul.
Notes
5. For more about the affinity between mathematics and music, refer to Bloch, Ernst. Essays on the Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jim Henle, “Classical Mathematics,” The American Mathematical Monthly 103: 1 (1996): 18-29; and Alison Motluk, “Can Mozart make maths add up?” New Scientist 15 (203): 17. For the relationship between music and language, refer to Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2007); Patel, Anirruddh. Music, Language, and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
6. The MTNA website is http://www.mtna.org/.