Episode 15: The Future of Music Education in America Part 1

Education has a long history of various movements based on theories, research, and edu-babble jargon. Child-centered, whole child, differentiation, dimensions of learning, cooperative learning, no child left behind, et al. As a public institution, education policy has always been influenced by politics and public policy, but it seems that we entered into a new world of the politicization of education first with the emergence of common core in the 2010s and currently with the ideas of social/emotional learning (SEL) and critical race theory (CRT). There is plenty being written about CRT right now. What it is, what it isn’t, etc. I will not go into an analysis of the implications of CRT and education, but I will say that I believe an underlying tenet of CRT is identifying a problem and then looking back to figure out how you arrived at a current situation. This should be done without bias, even though the result of the historical tracing may reveal certain biases. I think of it as being lost in a maze. We might find a way out by retracing our steps to discover how we arrived at our current state. Then armed with that knowledge we might find a way forward.