The English Teacher and Pop Music

Abstract

Summary The article underlines a disjuncture between schools' curricular model and the ways of experiencing and knowing developed by adolescents through the mass media. Pop music represents the extreme case of this disjuncture because it is marked out as the music exclusively of youth. Thus it is particularly important to understand the situation of adolescents in contemporary society and the needs served by pop in their lives. Adolescent culture is made up of groups showing distinct differences of lifestyle reflected by pop music. These differences are nevertheless variations on the ethos of the parent society, a dominant feature of which is the hedonism about which many adults have ambivalent feelings. Adolescents' search for identity in a rapidly changing society is exacerbated by such ambivalence, by the generation gap and by adult condemnation of pop music, in which adolescents seek integrative meanings. It is pupils in the higher ability bands who experience the greatest conflict between academic va...