When everything is highlighted, nothing is.

The title of this post refers to a line from Pixar's The Incredibles where the villain Syndrome says "because when everyone is a superhero, no one will be." I'll come back to that.

Fifteen years ago, my husband and I started the summer master's program at Northwestern. In two of those classes we covered some or all of the Reimer 3rd edition of Philosophy of Music Education. Basically, our copy of the book is well worn, and full of highlighting and notes penciled in the margin. (I also discovered some old photocopies of a Power Point presentation where my friend Wayne and I were passing notes to each other in class).

But as I started reading, I wondered if my highlighted sections or my notes (or Tyson's notes) would still resonate with me. Will I still regard the text the same way with twelve more years of teaching under my belt? Or has nothing changed and I'll just read and renew my same positions? So in re-reading, I used a different color to highlight, but wondered if very much changed will everything be highlighted?

The first thing that I notice is the sentence "Our profession needs such guidance at both the collective and the individual levels" (p 2). Because I was only 4 years into my career when I first read parts of this book, I read it on the individual level, how does this affect me and my students? Now I read it with the hopes of eventually teaching those who want to be teachers which means I must read it with the bigger picture in mind. Younger me completely missed the "philosophy is not advocacy" and that approaching it that way can be a weakness since the arguments would be easily overcome.

For example, "if, on the other hand, we have the feeling that our work is of doubtful value,...we can only feel that much of our life is of equally dubious value (p 3). This makes me think of the various people I have met in urban music programs who came to the profession through some other means such as a freelance performer with alternative or emergency certification and "teaching artists." How can we ever hope to present a united front philosophically if we aren't all even coming to the table with similar pedagogical training? Maybe dividing us that way isn't a bug, maybe it's a feature.

As I remembered from before (and from later chapters) "aesthetic education" refers to different levels of musical engagement, or Small's term musicking. The artist/professional has an aesthetic education that is broader or more nuanced than the amateur/aficionado, but Reimer's basic point is that aesthetic education should be for all students, not just the artist/professional. This concept calls into question everything about how secondary music education is currently set up. Our festival and contest systems, scholarship auditions, college entrances, even how we acknowledge or recognize the achievements of music teachers.

I think my transformation can be summed up by the difference in how I structured my syllabus as a first year teacher. In my first few years, I explained the concert/performance requirement in this way "music is a performance art, therefore the biggest part of your grade is the performance" (because otherwise what's the point?). Over time this changed to explaining it as "experiencing" music. Especially as I taught more and more students who could not take a performance class for one reason or another. The performance is not the point, it's a vehicle for the experience of communicating something aesthetic to an audience. Redefining it this way also gives the audience as much value as the artist since without them no musical dialogue can take place.