Music Educators Call for the Implementation of a National Music Curriculum

The Australian, 16 April 2009; The Australian, 17 April 2009

Leading music educators around Australia believe that schools have ignored music education for too long, and that it is time to implement a national curriculum that will enable students to learn about and study music, not just listen to music.

The Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA), which is a meeting of education ministers of all states and territories and the Australian Government who determine joint education policies, will today discuss whether to implement a compulsory national music curriculum.

The National Curriculum Board’s key task is to create and implement a national curriculum for English, maths, science and history for all Australian students from kindergarten to Year 12. Plans for national curricula for geography and languages are due to follow.

Australian Government Arts Minister, Mr Peter Garrett, has been invited to address today’s MCEETYA meeting in what music experts hope is a move to fast track the creation of an arts national curriculum, and it is ‘likely that music will be the first discipline for discussion’.

Musician and Australian Chamber Orchestra artistic director, Mr Richard Tognetti, believes that state and Australian government ministers should ‘act quickly’ before more students finish high schools without a grounding in music, such as ‘learning how to read music, play an instrument or sing in a choir’.

‘What's missing is a comprehensive national system that is unencumbered by state differences, a system that we can identify as a necessary part of the education net…I'd like to dispense with talking about whether we should be teaching pop or classical until we're out of the current Neanderthal age, then deal with those issues once we've come to terms with what universal music education actually is,’ Mr Tognetti said.

Conductor and music adviser for the Musica Viva in Schools Program, Mr Richard Gill, agrees that a national music curriculum is necessary. He says that ‘It's not about turning children on to music, or even to turning children on to classical music, because children are already turned on to music. They have iPods, they listen to music. What they are not tuned into is the study of music. And there is a big difference between listening and studying. What children need is a broad curriculum of depth [and] diverse music experiences, properly taught by specialist music teachers’.

 

 

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