writing a paper for cp III

This started out as a response to Chris but it started to get long, so I made it my own post:



I absolutely thought I was going to lose it in lab. I don't know if it is because my philosophy is drastically different from some of the people who spoke or what, but I felt as if many people in lab were completely discrediting critical pedagogy in their opinions. It's not our job as educators to expose our students to reality? I would believe the opposite. I would say that it is not our job as educators to SHELTER our students. School is supposed to be a place of mind expansion, a place where students are given the tools to think for themselves and form their own opinions. How can we go into a school environment and pretend we are going to foster this sort of experience if we are just going to sit there and censor everything that is actually a part of their current reality? It is completely backwards to me. I have been fighting a lot of these internal battles for a while now. I sit around and think that when I'm a teacher I will have to conform to a degree, so that I don't lose my job. However, I don't know if I will be able to. I think I will have to teach elementary where these severe internal dilemmas won't take on such a huge role. I'm not saying that teaching elementary doesn't have its own challenges, because it certainly does, but I think being there for the students' musical development when the individual isn't growing as much philosophically may be an easier place to actually give them all that you can give without running into problems with administration. For me, music is the pathway to the self. I say for me as to not generalize, but I am certainly not the only person ever to have felt this way. As we heard in choir during one of Lindsey Christiansen's lectures, Schopenhauer believed that music was the only thing that was the embodiment of the human will--- all other art forms and communications were developed in order to express this will in an abstract, while music was close enough to actually BEING the will itself. It is such a beautiful and intriguing concept. We are going into the world and sharing this incredibly powerful piece of life with a younger generation. Music is so much a part of us that I sometimes don't think "teaching" it is as much the point as fostering personal growth THROUGH music. Music IS personal. Music IS powerful. Music IS emotional. Why must we try to dumb it down and teach it as a black and white subject? It is interwoven into all facets of life, and is found in every organism. We are denying the very basic elements of humanity by deciding to close off music that actually exposes the thoughts and emotions of the youth of society. We can sit around and say that the music isn't "quality" and whip out TONS of examples which we feel are...BUT we can not discredit what is around us. Popular music consumes the consumers. Knowing this we can not ignore it, or censor it, or ban it from schools. Do we honestly believe that by keeping something out of the schools we are keeping it out of the lives of students? Are we really that naive? As one of my friends often says, it is like abstinence only sex education. I have never agreed more. I still believe very strongly in the exposure to classical music, but I feel like we should go about classical music as if it were popular music. We should talk about more of the human features of classical music and use the inevitable emotional connection to music as the link between genres. This is clearly a philosophical rant, and there is a lot more in me, but I am going to stop myself for now.
are we hypocrites for believing in both multicultural "authenticity" and censorship?

Okay everyone, I have a question to pose. I don't know if this came up in class last week or not, because I was sick, but let us talk about popular music and multiculturalism for a moment. We've had heated discussions in class about multiculturalism and the importance of "authenticity" blah blah blah. We've also had rather heated debates on the role of popular music in the classroom, and the issue of censorship. Here is an interesting thing to think about. We worry so much about producing "authentic" (yes, some of our definitions are probably contradicting, but that's another story altogether) music from other cultures...so why do we shut out the music of our own? Dun dun duuuun. Does this put any sort of spin on your attitudes toward censorship of popular music in the classroom? Should we ignore our own society, as it happens around us, and then still claim to be heavily interested in accurately representing the music of another culture? Please, chew on this and spit out whatever you'd like.