Am I missing something?

Help me work out this series of logic statements:

Americans hold something like 95% of the world's patents.

One would assume that means we think differently than each other, and that our culture celebrates and promotes that, and that our educational system does not stifle individuality.

Yet our traditional music programs generally focus on Western European and American art forms, and use almost exclusively traditional ensemble classes at the secondary level. There has been some movement, mostly in places where it has been necessary to save a full time teaching job, towards secondary general music (piano and guitar labs, and sometimes alternate ensembles such as marimba, steel drums, or mariachi). But these are the exceptions, and certainly there seems to be very little professional reward for offering these classes or even doing well teaching them (anyone's piano lab students been invited to a conference yet? No trophies for steel drum groups!).


We can see that sometimes we are only valued by administrators when we reach large numbers of students. An attrition rate of 2-3% between 6th and 12th grades is viewed as a success by our colleagues, but an administrator looking at ways to save money sees only that there IS ATTRITION, and no new students being recruited and added between those grades.

So as we struggle to remain relevant in the school system, somehow we seem to believe that testing traditional Western European musical skills will a) draw more students b) prove that we are doing our jobs c) make us a "legitimate" academic subject in the eyes of building colleagues and supervisors.


It doesn't seem to be working yet. At least not where I live. What I see is music teachers striving to preserve their "programs" instead of working on ways to teach music to the entire student body. It will be our downfall.