Abstract
This paper proposes that educative and ethical music making and teaching, which is based on a praxial philosophy of music education (Elliott and Silverman, 2014), can be carried out in a variety of ways that create places and spaces, in schools and community settings, for a variety of human values or “goods” that include, but go beyond, making and listening to classical instrumental music, or any other kind of music, for “the music itself.”One premise of this philosophical discussion is that music does not have one value; music has numerous values, depending on the ways in which it is conceived, used, and taught by people who engage in specific musical styles. For example, when music education is ethically guided—when we teach people not only in and about music, but also through music—we achieve what Aristotle and many other philosophers consider the highest human value—eudaimonia—which is a multidimensional term we explain the body of this paper.Following an examination of three community music settings that exemplify educative and ethical musical interactions, the paper provides a brief explanation of the nature of personhood that draws from embodied, enactive, empathetic, and ecological concepts put forth by several contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind nature. This sections leads to an examination to main constituents of eudaimonia: happiness and well- being as conceived by various scholars during the last 2500 years.The discussion ends by integrated the above themes with a discussion of a praxial philosophy of music education and its implications for school and community music education.
Highlights
Following an examination of three community music settings that exemplify educative and ethical musical interactions, the paper provides a brief explanation of the nature of personhood that draws from embodied, enactive, empathetic, and ecological concepts put forth by several contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind nature
The discussion ends by integrated the above themes with a discussion of a praxial philosophy of music education and its implications for school and community music education
What does it mean to know and understand our students? And why should music educators, university music professors, private studio teachers, community music facilitators care about the meanings and implications of personhood and eudaimonia? Regardless of students’ ages, or the fields of music we are preparing them for, “doing this work” effectively, educatively, and ethically means that our aims and teaching strategies should include enabling our students to achieve musical and personal abilities and dispositions that will increase the likelihood that they will experience deeper and broader eudaimonic values and in the future
Summary
What does it mean to know and understand our students? And why should music educators, university music professors, private studio teachers, community music facilitators care about the meanings and implications of personhood and eudaimonia? Regardless of students’ ages, or the fields of music we are preparing them for, “doing this work” effectively, educatively, and ethically means that our aims and teaching strategies should include enabling our students to achieve musical and personal abilities and dispositions that will increase the likelihood that they will experience deeper and broader eudaimonic values and in the future. He believed children should engage in guided activities that would develop the “proper virtues” in the processes of learning specific skills and understandings (Noddings, 2012) He insisted that educators and society at large should continually revisit the meaning of human flourishing and the best ways for helping young people achieve eudaimonic ways of life. As common sense would suggest, it is possible to make everyday experiences into flow experiences, complex fields of ethical action like music, which are rich in dynamic and divergent challenges and positive social circumstances allow for and provide support for the continuing emergence of new opportunities for flow development and, happiness, self-worth, fellowship, and more. This feeling of genuine connectedness to a larger group is the root of moral behaviour (pp. 65-66)
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