The Tragic Decline of Music Literacy (and Quality)

@bdp24 , Are you seriously suggesting that the decline in public schools teaching the humanities began on the right? Even if you could prove such a thing, it would be hard to support that that is still the case. Technology has driven the STEM curriculum. Big tech keeps it that way. Even if not intentionally.

The public school system is the domain of the left. The left drives STEM. The right approves.

Hard to pin the creation of obedient one dimensional worker bees on the the right. That's a whole different ideology and politic there. It is certainly someone's goal right here and right now though.

You speak about Empire and wars....Technocratic and economic empire...Usa liberating Europe... Perhaps but not without Russian tremendous effort against all the German forces....

I was speaking about spirit and culture....Take a written journal, or a TV news in america now; what is the content?

Almost nothing about world events and culture....An invisible censorship is there coming from where?

Freedom is not about being in jail or not, first and mostly..... Freedom is in the consciousness nowhere else....It takes naivete of popular culture to associate freedom with guns....That remind me of those fearing death and believing in technological immortality now...

Both of which exist in their current state simply and precisely because the U.S. permits them to do so.

The power of America empire comes from the Us dollars and the money system after the war...This is what you spoke about....The real america is not that, it is the creativity and the idea of freedom and possibilities given to men...

I spoke about the spirit and it is what we see in the cultural world...I spoke about values not domination....Values are directly relative to our link to the rest of the world and has nothing to do with money or power...

For culture power or money dont even exist.....😁Not knowing that is absolute ignorance....

This was called with a word that has no more meaning now: the " soul"

Where is the soul in Hollywood now? A rarity indeed....

But there is great number of giant souls in America, they are not in the TV nor in politic, nor in sight....My example was Chomsky the Einstein of linguistic, and a great historian, taken in the invisible jail of the censhorship like Soljetnitsyn in soviet Russia, apparently free unlike Soljenitsyn, but silenced by indifference and powerful censhorship...I dont like Trump but who has the power to silence him few days ago?

Dont take my remark an attack against the soul of America but an attack against the new materialist power dominating us all in Occident now and breaking America and the world at the worst hour......Especially now this year.....Eyes are made to see....

How can we oppose Chinese dictatorship in this way? A war is not the way to go....Except if we stay so weak spiritually....Then the guns will be the only answer.... Idiots prepare wars which are the business of others way more powerful, was saying the general Smedly Butler a great american soul 80 years ago....

Ignorance is closure of the mind in itself for people or countries....

My daughter graduated local public high school in 2018. She played violin in the school orchestra since 4th grade. By the time she graduated the school orchestra was most impressive and she had come a long way. Her teachers were highly dedicated and the kids loved them.
No doubt music, especially classical music suffers greatly in overall popularity these days but it still thrives in isolated pockets. But there is a lot of competition.....more diverse forms of music available than ever. So it’s a two edged sword. Sad in some ways but interesting in others. It’s all a matter of perspective. I was one of the only kids I knew interested in classical music growing up so....

Branford Marsalis said that jazz ain’t for kids. The same can be said for classical for kids of the past x amount of generations.

n80,

"The public school system is the domain of the left. The left drives STEM. The right approves."


Unfortunately true of the UK schools curriculum too.

My 16 year old daughter said her history school curriculum has dictated that her class spent two whole terms learning about the African slave trade and one term each for the past two years on WW1 trench warfare.

Fair enough, but she said there has been nothing on ancient Greece or the history of the Roman empire.

Therefore the entire history of the Romans in Britain and the importance of the ancient Greeks for the development of western civilization has been totally omitted.

Her artwork seems to be centred around a few post WW2 artists and photographers.

Once again no mention of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Dali etc.

As for musical education, this seems hardly any better today than it was back in my school days.

Thankfully our music teacher, who never bothered teaching us anything about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven etc did bring in his collection of Beatles LPs. He was quite an eccentric, often dressed as John Lennon as on the Abbey Road sleeve, and would bring in his own record player to play his discs.

On one shocking occasion he threw the school’s turntable across the room, claiming it was rubbish! He said he had a better record player in his car.

We may not have learned anything about Beethoven or Mahler, but he did make us write out lyrics from various songs from Sgt Pepper. So thank you for that Mr R, if not for the seemingly endless recorder lessons.

Anyway, this neglect of an historical context does seem to be a strange way of delivering education; whereby most British children will leave state education at 16 with hardly any awareness of what has gone before.

History still matters, doesn’t it?

Things weren’t much better in my day but at least we got to learn about some of the prime ministers since Pitt the Younger (Gladstone, Disraeli etc) and some of the key events in history such as the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Boston Tea Party!

In the UK we also seem to have a particular blind spot when it comes to the influence of the various Roman invasions of Britain under Julius Caesar and the emperor Claudius and their subsequent importance and legacy.

Another key event that gets glossed over is the English civil war of 1651 which is up there with Henry the 8th and his break with the Catholic church in regards to British history.

Yet Cromwell, as far as our education system (?) goes, remains to this day a largely unknown figure (like Guy Fawkes) who is mainly there to be mocked from time to time but never explained or explored.

I guess, as Michelle Shocked once sang, "The Book of History has many missing pages."

Especially in the books of the ones who seem to be setting the schools curriculum nowadays.

I’d like to think that in the British 2 tier school system, free and paid for, the private schools (from where most of our political leaders emerge), are still bothering to teach their children something of classical education and the arts.