Afterthoughts to "Music Lessons"(Making the Implicit Pedagogy Explicit)''Music Lessons'' has a musical form: it is a hymn of celebration, cast as a set of variations with introduction and coda. But music is only, as it were, the harmonic scheme within which these variations are realized; their true theme is autonomous learning. Speaking as educator rather than musician, this piece is about a process of learning which went on outside of institutions and undirected by others; and what it taught me about such processes. Throughout my formal schooling, with a precious few exceptions in college, I can't recall a teacher telling me anything humanly useful about how one went about learning -- nothing, I mean, that referred to an act undertaken by a whole and complicated person; nothing as simple as ''this is how I came to learn these things.'' ''Music Lessons'' is an outrageously detailed model for a dimension of teaching which should be present not in rare moments and individuals, but constantly, developing a consciousness of self-as-learner that is largely absent in our culture. This consciousness is found mostly outside the institutional domains -- for example, among the postwar generations, in their attention to how they grow and learn as emotional beings in relationship. But in schools, and in re cognitive education, it is almost unknown. If you ask most college students how they learn, they tell as much of the tale as their teachers reveal to them: I listen, I read the book, I think; as if some mechanical and narrow process were at work. Children of a more fortunate culture -- whose learning was undertaken at will rather than perforce, removing their need to repress awareness of its processes; and whose teachers encountered them not as specialists but as whole people -- might routinely understand their own educations in ways which few lucid individuals can manage now. As it is, our schools teach subjects to subjects, rather than learning to learners. When I imagine how they might be reconfigured humanely, beyond the principles sketched below I think of this dimension of "meta-learning," of learning about learning. It is not so mysterious as we pretend, and many institutional arrangements might be made to foster it. I discuss some in On Learning and Social Change. (1) Here I can only state a basic theme: Consciousness of one's learning is like any other consciousness, it develops when there is opportunity for its exercise, and withers when there is not. In our schools, students are made conscious of their learning almost totally in terms of its achievement (or lack thereof), rather than its process. Tests and grades are the main rituals that define the classroom. But education might also, and better, be built around rituals which involve people in understanding their own and each other's learning processes. Such rituals, if observed from first schooling on, might have profound effects on learners and teachers both. “Music Lessons" is a record of a "natural" process of learning, in which the learner was free to choose what and how he would learn, in a rich environment. Though I don't think such unconstrained educational processes are the only ones of value to our society, there is no avoiding the central irony: that being disqualified for formal instruction in music left me free to learn so much from it in other ways. Often I doubt that the magic of this learning can be institutionalized, and sometimes I think it wiser not to try, for fear of violating its spirit. But many people who try to learn subjects on their own fail to achieve even a fraction of what they might through school, let alone more; the waste of our potential and desire is immense. And I think it a mistake to dismiss my experience with music as an accidental product of a strong will and lots of luck, without relevance to schools per se. Worthwhile learning is always a unique and personal experience. No institution can "make" it happen, let alone by clockwork. But there is always a social face to our private experience; and magic doesn't just happen, its circumstances are prepared. Our present schools inhibit much of the magic that they might nurture. Standardized tests may be good for sorting technician skills, but they define as true value the ultimate value in the marketplace; and with standardized curricula they produce standardized studenthood, working against individuality of learning style and the vagaries of true engagement. Whether personal or cognitive, autonomous learning proceeds in natural rhythms and cycles within each individual, which school schedules disrupt mechanically. It involves quick, deep encounters and long, delicate co-operations, which are inhibited and interrupted by cold architecture, required studies, classroom habits of relating, etc. It flourishes when it proceeds from choices which coherently reflect personal and social needs. But the main purpose of the education the schools provide -- to service the cash-cold needs of technological capitalism and perpetuate its class structures -- precludes as a matter of course permitting these choices. So long as the schools serve to prepare people to endure the constraints of energy and meaning which make life in the present productive order possible, so long as they prepare people for the decades-long freezing of identity that goes with a "job" or "career" -- so long as the purpose of the schools is this, why, they function quite well, there is no reason to expect them to graduate a class of people who have learned how to learn and will keep learning at their own will. I'm sorry to sound so tart about the matter. I can't help sounding dogmatic, for there is space only to state this opinion, and not to explain it. To read most current writing on educational reform, one would imagine that the sorry state of schools had come about by accident, as the product of random ignorance, laziness, and stupidity, or in consequence of social forces whose natures were mysterious and incoherent. But it is worse than naive, it is irresponsible, to propose the obvious humane reforms, without facing squarely the fact that the schools do mostly what they are designed to do -- perpetuate the present organization and distribution of power in a bureaucratic state, and the systematic oppression and exploitation of people in class structures defined by economics, race, gender, and age. The consequences of this extend to the most intimate dimensions of learning. There can be no general reform of education, without dealing systematically with the roots of its problems. Though "Music Lessons" is about non-institutional learning, most of the principles behind the process it describes can as well be applied to schooling. Elsewhere (2) I have sketched a complex and specific institutionalization of these principles (which I do not imagine to be a complete set!); here I will summarize them piecemeal. Perhaps the most important thing to recognize is that they are political principles, stressing autonomy, decentralization, and democratic cooperation; and that such values may be implemented, much more than they are now, from the largest reaches of the educational system to its smallest groups. • The learner is free to choose his subject and his way of encountering it; to drop in and out of study, or shift his mode in response to need or opportunity. • His learning is mostly from doing real things, and little from academic exercise. He begins again many times. He learns as much by the process of his own creation as by recreating others' past learning. • His own motivation propels him. He has the power to enter into association freely with other learners. He depends on support groups formed this way. Such groups are enabled to pursue collective investigation autonomously, to its natural term. • He can get what he needs in the way of space, information, materials, and skilled advice. There is no telling what he may find relevant to his learning process; he is not inhibited from looking into everything. No arbitrary credentialing keeps him from using whatever might be useful. • He finds opportunity to teach what he learns, and learns by this. He learns about the process of his learning. • His learning in a subject takes him deep in its penetration of his self, and outward in its embodiment in society. He grows along his subject as a vine does along a trellis, over many years and windings. He becomes aware of the spiritual dimensions present in all learning. There is more to say. But even these few principles could not be honored in our educational system without literally reversing most of its values and procedures. ---------------------------------------------------------------
(1) On Learning and Social Change, E.P. Dutton, N.Y.; 1972 (2) "EDUTOPIA, or, 266 Suggestions for Reform in American Education." Some 70% appears in Schoolworlds '76, D. Bigelow, ed., McCutchan Pub. Co., Berkeley; 197 Return to: Top | Uncollected Essays | Home |