From Panopticon to Possibility: Rethinking Music Education Through Biesta’s World-Centered Lens

This paper reflects on how the traditional structures of Western classical music education, long reinforced by hierarchical authority and the “expert gaze,” are increasingly unsettled in contemporary practice. Drawing on Foucault’s panopticon as a metaphor, I show how performance-centered, teacher-dominant approaches have disciplined both students and parents while leaving little room for students’ development of subject-ness. Through a real teaching story, I reveal the emerging cracks in this long-standing system, where digital technology, alternative pedagogies, and shifting cultural values have begun to erode the conservatory’s insulated authority. To interpret this change, I draw on Biesta’s three functions of education—qualification, socialization, and subjectification—and his notion of world-centered education. I suggest that music education must not only prepare students with skills and cultural knowledge but also facilitate subjectification—the capacity for agency, responsibility, and freedom. The discussion highlights implications for practice, including teacher judgment, more balanced power relations, and reflective, technology-mediated pedagogies, suggesting that the future of music education lies in creating spaces where learners encounter the world not as passive recipients but as subjects in the process of becoming with it.