Change in Music Education: The Paradigmatic and the Praxial

There are two types of change in music education: widespread, systemic change that we will call paradigmatic; and smaller changes resulting from the day-to-day work of music educators, called praxial changes after the Greek word praxis. Some music educators confuse the two types of change and their causes, and they beseech the profession to bring about system-wide paradigmatic change. In so doing, they are insisting on the profession doing the impossible, as individuals and as a collective. The calling for and then failure to achieve unattainable goals is a part of our heritage that stretches back to the days of colonial singing school masters and the cultural pundits at Harvard.

Those folks strove for paradigmatic change in the form of reforming the public's musical tastes, and they failed completely. Before that, our misreading of Plato's philosophy as history seems to contribute to the modern myth that the music education profession can bring about paradigmatic changes in schooling. At the same time, like the world at large, music education continues to improve significantly, despite the hand-wringing of the doomsayers within the field. As has happened throughout history, future improvements are likely to come from gradual, praxial changes, and in the form of additions to the elective curriculum, not in additional required general music or in the dismantling of existing elective offerings.