It was never my intention or my expectation that this exploration of “The Problem” would occupy five sequential installments of my blog. Previously I never went past a two-part posting: perhaps I trust my audience more – or perhaps I am less concerned about maintaining their interest and more invested in using this space to explore ideas for my own benefit, as was always the blog’s original purpose. But some 4000 words later, a reality check is likely appropriate.
Reality Check No. 1: has the problem been accurately identified?
After reading the prior installments, a colleague sent me an email suggesting that I had the problem misidentified: that educator authoritarianism isn’t a trait inherited from teachers, but a reflection of our innate desire to acquire and subsequently abuse power. Essentially, it doesn’t matter how we’re taught: our nature is the problem, and it will not be suppressed.
Hobbes vs. Rousseau, nature vs. nurture. My colleague’s reading of mankind is rather pessimistic, and given current events at home and abroad it’s hard to contradict it. But a broader view of those same events reveals that the current political abuses of power were only made possible by the weakening, if not corruption or outright dissolution, of checks and balances, of systems and structures. If the abuse of power must be enabled, then it can also be disabled through effective safeguards like proper oversight and accountability. My position thus remains that cycles can be broken, no matter how entrenched they are, if the right mechanism to break them is found.
Reality Check No. 2: how widespread is the problem?
This I can answer confidently in my capacity as a music educator and particularly as a teacher of conducting: it appears virtually universal, although manifesting to different degrees as one might expect. Students are extremely eager to take on the dictatorial mantle of the conductor archetype and are extraordinarily disinterested in alternatives, regardless of outcomes. There can be no other explanation for this than their own enculturation through immersion within their large ensemble experience. Now it’s their turn, you see – the bullied become the bullies the moment they can, adopting a Sauron-like desire to dominate all before them when a podium is within reach. And it’s not just the students who suffer from this Podiumlust (the actual word would be Dirigentenpultlust, I believe) – I once wrote about a Glaswegian who felt it necessary to conduct a Celtic folk eleven in Porto Alegre in defiance of all cultural or generic norms and any kind of musical necessity. Or better still, consider the absolute conductor vanity project that is the Aurora Orchestra- an ensemble that never has a reason to look away from the podium, even when they clearly have zero need to look AT the podium. Professionals are equally susceptible.
There are of course exceptions: educators driven by boundless curiosity into research-validated new practices, and who implement them thoughtfully and consistently in pursuit of better outcomes. One comes to mind immediately – my Abreu fellow colleague Lorrie Heagy, who never did anything (anything) that was not carefully considered and deeply impactful. But this is certainly a case where exceptions prove the rule.
Reality Check No. 3: how serious is the problem?
Clearly, music teachers are not uniformly awful human beings out to bully students for the benefit of their own ego: I would go so far as to posit that most certified music educators are genuinely altruistic individuals. I recall Richard Hallam’s research into the motivation of teachers, which revealed that those working within conventional school networks were meaningfully more socially oriented than those working in the “Sistema” sphere.
The most extreme end of the problem is that it affords license or a sense of entitlement to a small number of people to commit criminal or illegal acts. But that is an extreme. The broadest implication of the problem is it lies at the root of music education’s innate resistance to meaningful change. This, singularly, is why El Sistema and “Social action through music” failed as a movement in North America: Sistema was an exercise in labeling, not praxial innovation.
So reality check complete: the problem is real, it is pervasive, and it has consequential implications, namely the stasis or stagnation it causes. To describe Sistema’s fall as inevitable is an abdication of responsibility: the failure of the movement must be viewed as an opportunity (perhaps the best in history) we were simply incapable of leveraging through our own pedagogical paralysis.
Jonathan Andrew Govias 