The Real Aims of Music Appreciation

Abstract

ROM THE VERY BEGINNING, American higher education has been faced with a choice between two general ideals: those of developing and educating our leaders, experts and more or less professional people at the expense of raising the general educational level of the people; or, on the other hand, extending the privileges of a general education to everyone capable of receiving them at the possible expense of the few most qualified to receive such training and benefit by it. That our choice of the second of these ideals, a choice based upon the principle that the success of a democratic government depends upon the development of the general understanding of its people, is fraught with danger has been recognized by many educators. Three quarters of a century ago the French historian, Ernest Renan, writing of expansion of higher education in the United States, made the pertinent observation that countries which, like the United States, have set up considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education, will have to expiate their error by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence. And many an English observer of our American scene has expressed, in even less polite, if more specific terms, his doubts about the wisdom of our policy of extending the benefits of higher education to an ever-increasing proportion of our population. Nevertheless, whatever our personal opinions may be regarding the wisdom of such a choice, we are, as a nation, more than ever committed to the extension of popular education as is evidenced by the recent report of the President's Committee on Higher Education. The majority of Americans, educators and laymen alike, in the words of a well-known educator, Earl McGrath, Dean of the College of Arts, Iowa State University, have fewer misgivings about the danger of trying to make race horses out of burros by extending educational opportunities than they have about the danger of making burros out of potential race horses by denying such opportunities to a large percentage of American youth. Our people are beginning to realize that our system of higher education, patterned originally after European (especially German) methods, and based upon a social philosophy that is alien to our political convictions, has failed to cater to the peculiar needs and fill the particular gaps that exist in their educational background. Again, to use the words of the educator just quoted, we are suddenly aware that in the United States, higher A Serious Critique of Cultural Opportunities in Our Present Educational System