African American Music Influence On Education

According to Sharon Anderson-Gould, a professor of philosophy in New York, Immanuel Kant, a German metaphysician and philosopher, believed that history in general is moving in a positive manner because it was moving towards a goal, such as freedom for cultural diversity and understanding (Heller, 2003, p. 2). Despite the differences that every culture has naturally, music and music education have always moved forward throughout time. Over the past century we as a world have seen drastic changes to how people think about certain aspects like religion, race, sexuality, and even stylistic choices such as music. These different styles come from different origins which, whether they are accepted now or not, are a part of different cultures and

Do to the previous philosophy that any music other than Western music is sub-par and “in development”, they felt the need to assimilate all aspects of education, including the European music style to American music and because American music was created from a mix of European music, many Americans believed music was the universal language (Kang, 2016, para. 1-4). However, even though European music was brought into American schools, music from Native Americans’ or African Americans’ cultures often weren’t because they had elements that where too strange and unlike the normal style. As a result, music being the “universal language” was not a completely true saying during the 20th century (Kang, 2016, para. 5-6). As the 20th century went on, more people realized that music is not universal, as Erich von Hornbostel and his assistant Curt Sachs had realized with their studies (Kang, 2016, para. 6-7).

In general, education shouldn’t be used for creating objects to attain a goal before others do; education should be to give students-of any age-the tools necessary to progress themselves forward as a person and simply to “care [for] themselves” (Popov, Najder-Stefaniak). Music education is not excluded from this idea. Instead of just letting students pass through classes, not knowing if they really learned anything, action needs to be taken, like how Theodore Tearne worked to change how children in New South Wales learned singing skills back in the early 1920s (Boyd &