The Steam Engine and the Ladder

What have been our obstacles with the philosophy of American music education?

John Dewey might say that we have struggled with the philosophy of music education because music is as complicated as philosophy is.

In his twelfth chapter of Art as Experience, Dewey starts by saying that we often have “a false idea of the nature of imagination” (p. 283) He posits that imagination is “the conscious adjustment of the new and the old,” that imagination is the experience or act of rendering one’s schema to allow for the newly gathered. But because this, as well as our multiple understandings of how we access and process music (most likely because we access and process music differently as individuals), is so difficult to agree upon, the process by which we decide how to teach music is challenging to pin down.

Dewey’s critiques of multiple philosophies of aesthetics also illuminates that we differ from individual to individual in what we deem important about art and the experience thereof. This is easily another reason why we have a hard time paring it down for a curriculum.

Two sections of “The Challenge to Philosophy” really stuck out to me: the steam engine and Plato’s ladder. One possible explanation for music education’s struggle to define itself could be where each stakeholder stands on the value of each rung of the “ladder” and whether or not they subscribe to the “ladder” at all. There is certainly a problem in prescribing any sort of morality upon ascending it; we ought to tread lightly and distinguish between ethics and morality in public school settings. But it also creates a hierarchy of understanding or beauty and knowledge that doesn’t allow for a return to simplicity, and we cannot close the door to a part of experience for any student.

The steam engine allegory reminds me of our modern drive to turn education into job training, and for music’s vain attempt to remediate itself to a support of a steam-engine model of education. Dewey uses the steam engine to demonstrate how imagined possibilities can be dead-ended or perpetual. This is often how we approach education in public school settings - we give them the knowledge, not for transformation of the mind, but to a productive end, in the case of education, to become particular kinds of members of the workforce. But music and, indeed, the rest of the arts, can provide a transformation of the mind, which is what education should be striving to do. It should perpetuate the mental acuity of the student and provide him an entire transformative experience.

Dewey, J. (1934). 12: The Challenge to Philosophy. In J. Dewey (Author), Art as experience (pp. 283-

309). New York, NY: Perigee Books.