theater, ballet, motion pictures, television, and the recording industries for the purpose of achieving a sound and mature national culture and international peace and good will.

MUSIC AND PUBLIC EDUCATION

(By Finis E. Engleman, Executive Secretary, American Association of School Administrators)

More than 150 years ago, when discussing his concept of civilization, John Adams said, "I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics, philosophy, and commerce so that their children in turn may have the right and privilege to study painting, poetry, and music."

Thus, even before the free public schools of America were established, aspects of their shape and processes were blueprinted by our second President. Fifty years after this statement by John Adams, farsighted humanists such as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard were convincing the new nation that it could not survive except as its citizenry was broadly educated. So the revolutionary institution known as the public schools was born and established.

Its broad purpose of equal opportunity for the sons of all men and its faith in the essential worth of each individual gave it from the very beginning, the humanistic qualities so essential to any nation of free men. This unique institution, which brought reality to the dreams of universal education for all, is probably the greatest contribution to mankind which the Western Hemisphere has produced. The educational content has often been restricted and even barren. But in the farflung reaches of this great country, there has been, in varying degrees, the persistent determination of public school leaders to bring to all children and youth the unique privilege of tasting and digesting an education for living consistent with the liberal tradition of Western civilization.

Slowly but surely progress toward a broad and comprehensive program, with the performing and creative arts playing an ever-widening role, is clearly discernible in the history of American education. It is thus that the cultural level of America has risen, step by step. With much of its support coming from the arts as nurtured and taught in the schools, America has reached a cultural stature of considerable proportions.

Retreat from these purposes, however, seemed to be in full sway in 1959. A space vehicle launched dramatically by a powerful and sinister world competitor threw fear into the hearts of many Americans, tending to cause a retreat from formerly held values and to place new priorities on what should be taught.

Consequently some of the school administrators of the Nation were thrown off balance, as was the educational program which they administered. It is worthy of note, however, that the American Association of School Administrators devoted all major aspects of their 1959 convention to the creative and performing arts, with all general sessions headlined by the master artists in the several fields including fine art, music, drama, poetry, and the dance. Near the close of that convention the association, made up of more than 12,000 of the leaders of American education, voted the following resolution:

"The American Association of School Administrators commends the president, the executive committee, and the staff for selecting the creative arts as the general theme for the 1959 convention. We believe in a well-balanced school curriculum in which music, drama, painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, and the like are included side by side with other important subjects such as mathematics, history, an dscience. It is important that pupils, as a part of general education, learn to appreciate, to understand, to create, and to criticize with discrimination those products of the mind, the voice, the hand, and the body which give dignity to the person and exalt the spirit of man."

Even as this resolution was adopted many Americans were crying, “Cut out the frills. Nonessentials such as music and literature must give way to the 'solid' subjects of science, mathematics, and foreign languages." And Congress was passing the National Defense Education Act, which encouraged school boards to buy bargains in science and language programs at the expense of the humanities. Since it was suddenly recognized that America must communicate with all the people of all the world, the Federal Government rushed to aid the teaching of French and German while the one language that is common and universal, the arts, was either abandoned or left to struggle against heavy odds

created by a Federal program that offered matching money for these curriculum fields, and thereby discouraging the use of local and State money for the humanities. Thus a very subtle control of the school curriculum was exercised. All who are familiar with the history of Rome know that a certain Roman senator was successful in stimulating the Roman Senate and his whole country into a frenzy of action by simply assuming a certain state of mind, dramatically draping his toga, and repeatedly shouting, "Carthage must be destroyed." By repetition and by continuous assertion he developed the image of a sinister foe and a line of action for his country which the Romans became compelled to follow.

Today we have several modern Catos in America who by virtue of access to mass media of communication, backed by determined persistence and dogmatism, have resorted to the ancient tactics of accepting some doubtful assumptions and pronouncing them as unquestioned truths. Armed with many questionable "truths," they have set forth by sheer repetition and exalted manner to discredit leadership of America's schools, teachers, and the school curriculum. They set themselves up as saviors and present "new" images of "proper" methods of instruction, "sound" philosophy and psychology of learning, and just "what" constitutes a curriculum for our times. At the same time an inaccurate image is presented of what the schools have done and are doing in structure, materials, content, and methods.

As Robert Frost would put it, "Like old dogs lying down and barking backwards with all the authority of a forward vision" these "saviors" have sounded a frightening bugle retreat call to a curriculum almost barren of the arts.

As I consider the many wise and unwise educational programs and policies which have been promoted by someone during the past half decade in almost every phase of American culture, I think it may profit us to keep in mind an expression attributed to one of our great British literary figures.

When Robert Louis Stevenson was a boy, he sat at his window watching an old streetlamp lighter as he went by touching his lighting wick to the gas burners. Robert's mother, concerned over the boy's silence, asked what he was doing. He replied, "I am watching a man punch holes in the dark."

The leaders of public education have long ago assumed the role of lamplighters where the souls of men cry in darkness, ignorance, and fright. I firmly believe these same men are now reforming their ranks and will immediately go forward with a record curriculum demanded by a civilized culture.

Although sometimes possessing only inadequate wicks and insufficient oil, those who operate our schools have consistently and continuously punched holes in the dark.

The darkness of ignorance, prejudice, and incompetence shrouds the world and America is far from free of it. Each individual with 10 talents or with 1 has the potential to penetrate this darkness and to throw light on a segment of the universe. Light of a great magnitude is necessary for some segments; but light of a lesser brilliance, like that so helpful in a photographer's darkroom or in a damp cellar, is also of great worth. When the lights spread from many individuals are put together brilliance like that in a fluorescent-lighted highway dispels the darkness.

When any light goes out or when a new one is lit, the degree of darkness changes. Thus universal education, a broad program suitable for each pupil, gains full support from a law of nature. If education is to have quality, it must also have quantity and diversity. It is through quantity, and universal education, that the greatest number of samplings of potential talents of a diverse character may be found and developed. And a modern, complex world demands more diversity of human competence than ever before. But diversity is attained not only by diverse human potentials but by diversity of educational programs that nurture all these diverse potentials. But democracy and technology are not the enemies of culture, and mass communication is not the source of its own poison.

The highbrows' worry over "Masscult" is to some extent an alibi for their own doubt and confusion about the relation of art to a democratic society. There is a public, enlarged and enlarging, with a common language and tradition. It must be both the source and audience for such continuing cultural advances as our civilization may make. As Jacques Barzun has put it, "What we have undertaken no other society has tried: we do not suppress half of mankind to refine part of the other half." Instead the refinement must be public and general if our civilization is to be democratic as well as great.

Today the battle is in full fury. Ground lost during the past 4 years in preserving a balanced program has not as yet been reclaimed, but I am optimistic enough to believe that any institution founded on values so close to the aspirations, the hopes, and the very nature of man and so necessary to a free society will not be denied its destiny. Americans surely know that Booth Tarkington was right in his belief, “A country could be perfectly governed, immensely powerful, and without poverty; yet if it produced nothing of its own in architecture, sculpture, music, painting, or in books it would some day pass into the twilight of history, leaving only the traces of a creditable political record."

At this point I quote my own message to you as found in the December 1958 Music Educators Journal: "No other civilization has meant more to mankind than that developed on the peninsula of Greece. There a mere handful of men produced the art, the drama, the philosophy which time does not destroy. From these few thousand persons the world has a legacy of great worth. The Greeks indeed taught mankind the joy of beauty, the artistry of design and form, the drama of life, the strength of logic, and the value of truth.

"Today the world is shaken by new knowledge of nature and the power released by its technical utilization. The physical aspects of life and material values have risen to ascendancy. The new release of energy gives man the sheer physical power for moving mountains and shooting the moon. Old feelings of security, of complacency, have been turned topsy-turvy as another great power with a conflicting philosophy threatens our physical Goliath.

"So America may be playing the fool by lessening its concern for what the Greeks held to with greatest priority and by frantically plunging into · an education program pointed almost exclusively at material values.

"The incessant cries for technicians, engineers, chemists, physicists, mechanics, skilled industrial workers, have seemingly drowned recognition of the everconstant need for artists, philosophers, musicians, historians, and poets. The baser emotions of fear and greed have done much to crowd out the nobler emotions of appreciation of beauty, rhythm, color, design."

The urge to find the true destiny of man, the ends he should live for, and his true relationship to the universe must not give way to a frantic race for physical power and technical superiority. Thus it seems that all of us who are responsible for an education of most value to a civilization dedicated to the essential worth and dignity of each individual, along with a further dedication to long-established humanistic values of Western civilization, have the privilege and responsibility to cling fast to and improve an educational program that is both balanced and comprehensive, both scientific and esthetic. It seems clear that the school administrator of modern education in the United States will not forsake the wisdom and courage which his responsible position demands he demonstrate.

My thinking is sometimes at great divergence to that of wiser men, but I am unshaken in my belief that the arts and humanities are a desirable and a fundamental part of the daily life of the educated man; and, by the same token, it may be assumed that they are a vital necessity in the daily life of the less educated and even illiterate, in the sense that we often use that word.

Social anthropology throws much light on the nature and quality of humankind. It is important that we be sensitive to the fact that most illiterate peoples have developed to a very high degree folk art, the dance, and folk drama as a basis for their cultural existence. Thus they make secure their claim of being human beings of higher order than mere animals. It seems clear that if the arts are so essential to primitive peoples, then they must become increasingly so for those where culture and education have been developed to a high degree. A civilization simply isn't civilized in the absence of the arts for the many. Any cultrue that reserves the finer things to an elite group will lose it for the select. Any art form that fears contamination and loss of prestige when enjoyed by a great majority will fail by virtue of its own assumed exclusiveness.

Since art and music are so fundamental to full and satisfactory living at all levels of civilization, need we belabor the argument that they must be given a place not only in the elective areas of the curriculum but also as part of the common learnings.

Those who insist that Communist competition demands that America throw most, if not all, of our resources into a very limited field might well be asked the question, "Why fight a war if we first give up all that would justify a fight?" Furthermore, as we struggle to be understood by the millions of surging people in the underdeveloped world it might be well to note the majority of them are more interested in Jefferson, Lincoln, Twain, and Bernstein, than in Ford, Urey, Rickover, or Edison. They like America's values more than her machines.

They like our humanists more than our engineers. Fortunately, other scientists applaud when James Killian, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says, "The image of America may be shaped by the qualities of its inner life more than by its exploits in space."

All I have been saying adds up to my belief that the program in music is so important that it should stretch from the kindergarten through the college. Like other great disciplines, opportunity for the specialists must be provided for, that is, those who have special talents, special gifts, and are blessed with academic competence. Children with these special talents should be identified early and should be given the opportunity to become professionals either in the purely academic aspects of the discipline or in combination with the performing aspects. Thus, the school program should provide opportunity for good general music for the great mass of students who will not be professionals but who need education and experience in music as much as they need education in science, language, or history, merely as a basis for living a wholesome life.

The music program should be treated as a serious and solid subject field. The toughest subject I ever took was one in music, and homework didn't give a ready answer. For many it becomes too tough to master, just as is true for some persons in any discipline. I think I must agree, however, that music, like most of the humanities, has qualities which bring greater depth of emotion and greater heights of appreciation and pleasure than is common in some of the other respectable fields. This, I would contend. is its added quality of great worth. Man has too few of the inspirational, esthetic, and exalted pleasures, and music should not retreat from its unusual opportunity of contributing to this great need of all human beings.

I urge, however, that you not assume the false psychology and, I would believe, false philosophy that your subject should be made tough in the sense of its being unpleasant and discouragingly obscure. You need not attempt to gain false academic respectability by accepting a false concept of what constitutes it. Truly, the great in life is always simple and quite readily discernible. The subtlety; the abstract depth; the mathematical scope; the range of meaning, coupled with the art and complex intricacy of performance and interpretation, permit music to match scholarship with any discipline.

The value of simple performance for the many should not be discounted. I am not in favor of spending the number of hours in noisy band practice for the long marches on the football field, which I have infrequently observed. I do believe, however, that the youngster who discovers that he himself can sing a simple melody or can produce harmony with a woodwind or brass instrument has gained added stature as a human being and possibly may have a limited power which will give him and others the keys to hours of future happiness.

I spent 2 years during the war in the cold Arctic where the nights were long in winter and where no source of amusement was found except through that invented and produced by the men of our Navy unit. From unknown sources pianos were procured (a mystery explainable only by the Seabees) and he who could play piano was of more value than an admiral. So I beg of you that, in this struggle now for academic respectability, you not take from your great field those simple aids to good living such as participating comfortably in group singing and instrumental ensemble groups. Possessing a friendly power to join in fireside singing of hymns, ballads, songs from musical comedy, and light opera may bring lasting pleasure to many men. Nor must you attempt to make your subject, which is in many respects academic and abstract in high degree, so much so that it is obscure merely for obtaining the quality of appearing difficult.

Furthermore, may I say just a word about the instruction, even though I am as far afield in my right to make this observation as I was when they started discussing the content to be taught. First of all, as in any other discipline, the music teacher must be a master of his own field. I have a strong conviction that there is some danger that music teachers, like other teachers of great disciplines, may become so specialized that they cannot be classified as first-class music educators. I say this not to minimize the importance of the specialized skills so very essential to teaching aspects of the curriculum but rather with the conviction of the importance of being educated teachers or directors in music first of all, and second, being conductors of orchestras, choruses, bands, and the like. Music's relatedness to the whole of education, its place in the whole mosiac of human understanding and culture, needs to be understood by the teacher. Also, the working materials and methods peculiar to the music area being taught

should be a part of the toolkit of any good teacher. In other words, difficult as it may seem, the music teacher should be broadly educated with a wise sprinkling of mathematics, literature, history, art, drama, and philosophy. The music teacher profits much by being an educated person as well as a specialist in music. Furthermore, knowledge of these content fields must be supplemented with an understanding of the psychology of human growth and development, as well as by what research and experiences show us concerning the best tools of teaching and the best methods of using these tools.

I next hazard to suggest that music educators beware of becoming prosaic and obsolete not only as to appreciations and skills but also as to their knowledge of music's new designs and emerging qualities. Let us not be hoodwinked into the notion that new knowledge, new techniques are restricted to science. Music, art, and the dance are no more limited to old boundaries than is physics or chemistry. When I first heard jazz it was recognized and accepted as music by only a few. These new noisy incantations were too different, too unorthodox to be understood by my ears accustomed to other forms. You dare not be likewise blinded. Hold fast with one hand to the old but reach eagerly with the other

for the new. This world has never been in such revolution as now. New ideas and new concepts are erupting so fast that the time spread of an idea has no conventional restrictions. For these reasons I urge that you reexamine not only your methods but the minimum programs you have established in the schools. Furthermore, don't be afraid to experiment. If this is not done, obsolescence will be upon you, and with obsolescence usually comes decadence and elimination. Possibly as I give you so much free advice about music and music teaching you may be asking the questions: "What is the role and attitude of the school administrator as it pertains to the field of music? Is he not partial to other fields? After all, is he not the biggest obstacle?" Since the college major of the majority of school administrators, according to a recent survey, is either in the natural sciences or in the behavioral sciences, you may readily assume that these are the fields to which he would give the greatest emphasis. Frankly, I don't know because I have not made an inventory of all school administrators and what their prejudices really are, but I am convinced that his graduate professional preparation has in most instances given him an appreciation and understanding of the importance of a broad comprehensive curriculum which includes not only the sciences but the humanities and vocational studies as well. Thus, he often sits as a judge or mediator trying to keep balance when many subject field specialists are clamoring for more time and attention, and the reactionists among the public insist on "basic" education only.

In recent years, of course, some of these fields have had support from those who fear we are falling behind the Communist world and who would place high priority on fields other than music. Likewise, the industrial world often demands those practical subjects such as mathematics, science, and vocational subjects, little realizing the economic value of the arts; and, since the economic leaders are often the big taxpayers with power structures all of their own, boards of education and superintendents are, on occasion, unduly influenced. Since sometimes it is a battle among the power structures of a community to determine where the greatest emphasis should be, it might be good advice to the music educator to remember that he often has allies which he doesn't use. Maybe the music teacher should be a student of community sociology too.

Confidentially, I have known superintendents, pushed by the pressures of certain community forces, who would give one subject more emphasis than it deserves, but who would prize greatly some pressures from another direction to counter the forces. Thus they would be given the freedom to establish a balanced program with each subject in its proper place.

Possibly I should give a word of caution at this point. Realizing full well the appeal of music as a public relations agency, may I urge that you not use this lesser strength in a big way. I refer here to persuasion by a dramatic public performance sometimes found at athletic events. Performing groups which have color and considerable public appeal but which consume much time and energy and produce relatively little high-class music should have only modest support from music educators. In other words, don't overplay the showmanship which may be achieved by prostituting music.

May I congratulate you on your magnificent contribution to the cultural maturity of the United States and reaffirm my belief that the cultural maturity of America can never be achieved in adequate or proper proportions unless the