Rethinking Participatory Limits

Abstract

This final chapter focuses on more recent (post-1960) curriculum guidelines and standards. It is about the mood and tenor of those reforms and how they reflect contemporary Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind movements for national educational reforms. In the last two decades, the music curriculum responds to national emergencies such as the child “left behind” with a profile of the child who prepares for the global economy. In this chapter, I analyze proposals made by the state of Wisconsin issued during the last decades of the twentieth century and curriculum guides from the period from 1997 through 2005.I also describe some of the controversy surrounding hip-hop that can be considered reenactments of preferences for particular dispositions. Toward the end of the chapter, I take up the process of transforming (alchemizing) hip-hop practices as music study and the double gestures involved in making hip-hoppers into school music exemplars. This is followed by some concluding remarks on proposals by other educators who are also working to break down the demographic boundaries so detrimental across subject areas as well as in music programs. I conclude with some thoughts on the difficult contradiction, even oxymoron, of planning democracy for others and the limits of progressive thought and “democratic” reform.

Interviewer: Do you think the new curriculum guides will be followed by most music teachers in the district?

Mr. K., music teacher: You know, I think a lot of them will try to, but there will be a problem because some won’t follow it at all and then the next teacher will have to pick up the pieces. To do the new curriculum well you have to work on it about 80% of class time—drilling all the elements and notation skills over and over. That leaves very little time for just doing music.

Interviewer: What’s the most difficult aspect of teaching for you?

Mr. K. I think it’s when the kids, especially the more outgoing ones, just want to sing along or take part of the lesson or interact. I am completely torn between reining them in and just letting them enjoy it. (Gustafson 1991, 16)