Peter Varley wrote:

>Firstly, the purpose of schools is, ideally, to educate rather than to
>teach facts.

It's not one or the other.  You can't educate someone who doesn't know
certain underlying facts, which must therefore also be taught.

>In music, any attempt to educate ought, by analogy, to explain _why_
>Schubert's music is better than Rossini's, but that obviously contains
>a judgement with which not everyone will agree.

That's not my idea of educating school children in music at all.  I'd like
them to know some Schubert.  And some Rossini.  (When I was young, all kids
knew Rossini's William Tell overture because its finale was the theme music
for The Lone Ranger, a popular American radio program.) I'd also like them
to know some Beethoven and Tchaikowsky.  And Mozart and Bartok.  I'd like
them to have as broad an exposure (and not necessarily a deep one) of what
has been composed as time and resources permit.  Tests would not be on who
is the better composer.  Nor would it be on recognizing chords or
intervals.  It would be on recognizing a movement from a work to which they
had previously been required to listen.  It wouldn't be a make or break
course, like language or mathematics, but as an item in a curriculum, it
would be a starting point, where none had existed before, for children with
the necessary inclination to explore classical music.

>Secondly, CM is not part of the culture in which I (or my ancestors) grew
>up.  While I was growing up, most people listened either to the Beatles or
>to the Rolling Stones (but not both).  My Yorkshire ancestors came from
>brass band territory.  I don't know what music my Welsh ancestors listened
>to (they were too far east to be part of the valleys choral tradition).
>I love Schubert's music, but the culture in which I live has very little
>in common with Schubert's Vienna - I live now, not two hundred years ago,
>I live in a seaport town, not the land-locked capital of an empire, and
>(AFAIK) the Secret Police don't have their eye on me.

At first I thought you were going to say that, as a non-European, classical
music as some of us here are using the term, was not part of your culture
or that of your ancestors.  But I suggest that it was.  While your family,
even your extended family might not have cared a fig for Bach or Handel,
they lived in a land where he, and the other classical European composers
were played in the concert halls and opera houses and people, even if not
from your family's social circles, came to hear them.  Maybe your ancestors
cared more for Wordsworth than for Shakespeare, for Dylan Thomas than for
T.S.  Eliot, and maybe for none of the foregoing, but these were some of
the writers, along w/ Balzac and Victor Hugo, Schiller and Goethe, Tolstoy
and Dostoyevski, to name just a few more, whose works were read, in
original or in translation, in your country and elsewhere.  (My wife read
Hugo and Goethe, among others, in translation when she was growing up in
China.) I'm fully aware that, more and more, fewer and fewer students are
exposed to these masters of literature in their school courses, and more's
the pity.  The trend, if there is one, should be reversed.  And by the same
token, there should be an exposure to classical music.

>If the idea is that the school teaches what the culture values, it ought
>therefore to be brass band music, choral singing, or whatever, not CM.

That too.

>Thirdly, there is quite often a reaction against the things which are
>taught in schools.  I think most of the hostility to Shakespeare comes
>because the plays were forced on people in school, and I suspect that any
>residual hostility to CM comes from the same cause, and not because it is
>associated with a snobbish elite.

We still teach algebra even to students who suffer severe stomach disorders
when even thinking about it.  Seriously, if students are hostile to what is
taught in schools, the fault is often not in the subjects but in the manner
of presentation.  It so happens that today's New York Times had a moving
article about Leontyne Price (now 73) introducing inner city children to
opera singing.  Here are some excerpts:  "You have no idea how much it
means to me to stare the world's future in the face," she told them.  "To
see your beautiful eyes, your beautiful skin, your beautiful hearts -- it
warms my heart."

Touched, she started to sing, without accompaniment, "This Little Light
of Mine," her "mother's favorite spiritual," as she used to describe it
in recitals.  In an interview later that day, she admitted "never being
more nervous" than when she saw the anticipation on the faces of her young
listeners.  "I didn't know whether the word 'opera singer' would intimidate
them," she said.  "But I didn't want to be condescending either.  Kids can
always detect that."

Indeed, when she began singing, some of the boys and girls initially
reacted with grimaces and squelched laughs.  To many children everywhere,
the sound of an operatic soprano's voice must seem weirdly loud and
strange.  But most of the youngsters listened agog.  Even those pretending
to cover their ears seemed stunned.  When Ms.  Price ended her performance
of the tender spiritual with a gleaming high note that sopranos 40 years
her junior would covet, the children cheered, applauded and asked for more.
She eventually complied, with a grandly moving solo of "America the
Beautiful."

>Personal experience suggests that children who attend out-of-school chess
>clubs stick with the game far more often than children who are taught chess
>as just another school subject.  By analogy, some sort of 'music club',
>run principally by and for adults but where interested youngsters are
>encouraged and treated as equals, might be a much better way of introducing
>them to CM.

The difference here, again, is that chess, if it is taught in schools at
all, would not be a subject taught just to provide an exposure but rather
to make the students better chess players.  It might be interesting to have
a course in chess where the children (who presumably would already know the
moves and rules) were simply shown some famous games, games w/ spectacular
combinations involving substantial sacrifice of material, skillfully
planned and executed end-games, games that won brilliancy prizes, not to
make them better players, but to show them how Morphy and Steinitz and
Capablanca and Lasker and Fisher and Kasparov, etc., played this game which
I wish I were better at.

>>In an ideal system, some self selectivity can be encouraged by making
>>libraries, the contents of which are unlikely to be exhausted by any one
>>student, available.
>
>I agree entirely.

Maybe we agree on more matters than first appeared.

Walter Meyer