A Historical Review on Theories of Sequential Learning in Music and Related Documents for Textbooks from Late Qing Dynasty to 1970’s Reform in China

Abstract

It has been an appealing topic in the academic and practical fields pertaining music education that music learning should obey a proper sequence in regard of contents and skills so that children will be allowed to learn music in the way suitable to their mental and physical growth without abrupt encounters causing frustration and extra difficulty. This means that sequential learning in music involves two facets, requiring music educators to be careful when dealing with curriculum and textbooks. One is to pay attention to the general logic of music to be learned as a school subject – from the easy to the difficult, from the near to the remote, from the surface to the inner sophisticated, from the sensational experiences to the intellectual understanding or abstract thinking, etc. Since early ages of human endeavors, educators have been expressing opinions about this issue; some were concerned with general orientations while others provided specific strategies which might be applied to the learning of school subjects. Among these giant people, Confucius expressed his conclusions about the former, and with latter pertaining to music, the learning sequence seemed to be cared in two lines. One was practical exploration in real setting doing curriculum design for schooling, while the theoretical construction was carried out systematically by a few scholars among whom Edwin Gordon stood out as the most eminent. This article touched these two lines of work by tracing back from ancient Chinese classics to the “<i>Great Didactic</i>” established by Comenius, the founder of modern theory for school teaching. All these men contributed significantly to the ideas and conceptions for a proper order or sequence for learning, including learning in music to certain extend. In addition to the early ideas and modern theories on this topic, this article found that from late Qing dynasty (1904) to early Reform time (1979) in China, a practical endeavor pursuing sequential learning in music was consistently carried out and written by generations of music educators in more than a dozen of official education documents in the forms of national standards or syllabus for school music. Because sequential learning is a strong factor which inevitably influences the logical layout of music textbooks and the way of teaching and learning thereafter, a historical review seems necessary to run through these education documents to depict some experiences and lessons for the national curriculum design and textbook development of today.