Transformational Education and Critical Music Pedagogy: Examining the link between culture and learning

This essay seeks to uncover liberatory practice in an epistomological appraisal of culture, foregrounding two very different views of its role in education. A traditional view of aesthetics, as promulgated by Mathew Arnold, will emphasise the power of culture or the arts to transform or uplift. Examples from the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx will argue that culture's primary function is not artistic production or aesthetic satisfaction, but rather education—or indoctrination. Viewed from opposing angles, both writers saw culture as teacher and subject. The results of their thinking gave birth to 20th-century critical theory. The author asserts that a critical review of the meaning of culture, particularly the relationship between education—formal or otherwise—and our society's dominant culture must lead to action. Teaching examples will illustrate a sense of possibility, of transformation, attempting to reconnect music education with real life. Ambiguities, however, surround such attempts. By way of conclusion, an emancipatory hybrid is suggested, one whereby learning is culturally meaningful, aesthetic and revolutionary.