The return of moral questions: expanding social epistemology in music education in a time of super-diversity

Leaning particularly on Zygmunt Bauman’s thoughts, this paper analyses past theorizations of music education, asking if these trends have created a value indifference and moral blindness in terms of who ‘we’ want to be in super-diverse societies. The paper pinpoints the need for a professional social epistemology in which social integration brings forth the use of moral imagination beyond the bounds of existing musical and educational practices whilst constructing the ‘we’. Post Second World War music education theorisation shunned the idea of schools as spaces of education fostering a ‘common culture’, an idea seen as characteristic of nationalistic music education. The cognitive turn towards individual knowledge construction, first manifested in the aesthetic approach and then followed by the ‘practice turn’ and rights-based multiculturalism, has focused on individual cognition and identities in relation to diverse musical practices. The paper argues that the increasing diversity, polarisation, and consequential policy demands for social integration now require that music education needs to return to moral questions about how we as a profession potentially construct ‘our life’ and ‘our values’ in educational contexts.