1

On The Education of Bennett Reimer (b.1932-2013)

Paul Woodford
Like many of my American colleagues of a certain age, Bennett Reimer has been a part
of my professional life for my entire career, beginning in 1977 or thereabout when I was
introduced to his philosophy by David Elliott in an undergraduate music education seminar at the
University of Toronto for which Reimers first edition of his landmark A Philosophy of Music
Education (1970) was required reading.1 Elliott was at the time Reimers acolyte and, as I recall,
there was little criticism of the latters book or philosophy (although Reimer was critical of the
lack of philosophical grounding and intellectual purpose(s) for music education in schools). My
classmates and I struggled to understand the intricacies of Reimers philosophy, and particularly
the ideas about feeling and form that he had borrowed from Susanne Langer, but we seldom, if
ever, questioned what was read of his philosophy. We sensed that Reimer and Elliott were saying
something important, almost spiritual, and were inspired by their talk about the need for a
philosophy of music education that could provide much needed professional guidance and
direction by focusing on the fundamental nature [italics mine] of the art of music . . . and its
value in human life.2
As had also happened to Reimer in the 1950s when introduced to ideas about music
education and philosophy by Charles Leonhard at the University of Illinois, I experienced a
professional awakening that changed my life. Like Reimer, I had no notion that there WERE
[emphasis his] any ideas in music education, and exposure to his philosophy was mind
expanding and thus transformational in that it caused me to start thinking more deeply about my
chosen profession.3 In no way, however, did his philosophy challenge my intuitions or beliefs
about the importance of music education, rather, it confirmed some of them while giving them
flesh and substance through the written word.

Upon completion of my undergraduate studies, I was imbued with an almost religious

zeal for music teaching, and Reimers book proved true to its promise of bolstering my
professional confidence by helping me to develop a coherent belief system about the nature and
value of music that provided professional inspiration and direction for decision making. His book
made me a better teacher in demanding high musical standards from my students, and his
philosophy made me a more thoughtful conductor with respect to realizing the expressive
potential of scores. My students, however, learned nothing from me about musics many other
important roles and purposesits many other meaningsand the myriads of ways it impacted
their lives and society as a whole. It never occurred to me to direct their attention to, or to
encourage any kind of social critique of, the music that they encountered in their everyday lives
so that they might understand how it literally contributed to the shaping of individual and
collective consciousness and identity, far less raise their awareness of how music was often
implicated in social and political problems. Music was taught by me as if compartmentalized
from other subjects and segregated from the rest of students everyday lives and experience.
But then, Reimer had long admonished teachers against emphasizing musics many social
and political meanings lest it distract from its aesthetic meaning, which was ineffable.4 In one of
his very first publications, in 1959, he argued that music was a discipline unto itself and that
music education should have little to do with politics or other secondary values, except
perhaps indirectly.5 Later, in A Philosophy of Music Education (1970), he rejected the
progressive education idea of linking music instruction to society and its problems that had long
served as an umbrella philosophy for education as a whole. While recognizing that progressive
education had made schools a truer reflection of society and a more influential force in the lives
of children, and had enormously strengthened the position of music education, he observed that

it had also led to a decline in emphasis on teaching subjects for their inherent value.6
According to Reimer, Quite contrary to the position of John Dewey, the most important founder
of Progressive Education, school practices shifted somewhat from academic learning to social
adjustment.7 As is explained later in this paper, however, Dewey (b.1859-1952) would have
taken exception to Reimers description of music as an academic subject and discipline unto
itself, segregated from other modes of experience.
Much later in his career, after the sociological and postmodern turns of the late 1980s and
1990s, Reimer modified his views somewhat about the relation of music to politics and other
supplementary or contributory educational values in response to feminist and praxial
critiques.8 There was a place for them in music education, and including philosophy of music
education, but to the end he remained adamant of musics distinctiveness and autonomy from
other school subjects and domains of experience. The central mission for music teachers was to
engage their students with musics power to capture, display, and share experiences of our
affective selves.9 Music had political or other meanings and uses that perhaps warranted
consideration in school programs, but only so long as they were woven skillfully into the musical
fabric, thereby contributing to the expressive whole and were and not just crudely superimposed
onto the sound structure. Throughout his career, he insisted that music had some essential nature,
some ways of knowing and being that music and only music can provide, even though he was
hard pressed to explain exactly what those were and how they were unique to music.10 He
remained cynical about any claims that music was the [italics mine] way to overcome political
problems.11
One wonders, though, what could have been more important or valuable in the music
education of children than helping them to discern and appreciate the power and social

significance of music in their everyday lives? As is explained in what follows, there were
historical and political factors and forces at play in Reimers world during the 1940s and 1950s
and beyond that shaped his and other educators understandings of the nature of knowledge and
of the purposes of all education, and including music education. During the formative years of
Reimers educational career in the 1950s, teaching for socio-political awareness, as Dewey had
proposed, would have been perceived by government and the rich as a threat to capitalism and
therefore as un-American.12 Given Reimers early rejection of progressive education, it is only
appropriate to consider what Dewey might have said, were he still alive, in response to Reimers
philosophy so that readers might better understand its political over- and undertones about which
he and his contemporaries were either oblivious or chose to overlook for reasons of national
security and/or professional intimidation as America mobilized to fight the Cold War.

Reimers Disciplinary Knowledge versus Deweys Critical Awareness

In calling for music to be taught as an autonomous domain and discipline unto itself,
Reimer was clearly influenced by Leonhard and Robert House who, in their influential book
Foundations and Principles of Music Education (1959/1972), declared that teaching for
democratic citizenship or other extrinsic values would only result in a decline in musical tastes
and standards among the young.13 To both Leonhard and the young Reimer, the emphasis in
music education was to be on the true nature and value of music, that is, what was directly
related and unique to music,14 by which was meant musics structural properties and
emotional content.15 The latter referred to the almost religious response one might experience
listening to and/or performing so-called great music which allowed deeper insight into the
human condition.

Reimer also cited Dewey in support of his claim for musics uniqueness, that it allowed
individuals to achieve a form of spiritual transcendence, although he was mistaken in implying
that Dewey viewed this quasi-religious quality of musical experience as the goal or end of music
education. Nor was it unique to music. While acknowledging that psychological response to art
was important to aesthetic experience, Dewey contended that it was not an end in itself but part
of the process of developing a heightened consciousness of ordinary experience. To quote
Dewey, I can see no psychological ground for such properties [the religious feeling that
accompanies intense esthetic perception] of an experience save that, somehow, the work of art
operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole that
accompanies every normal experience.16 The religious quality of aesthetic experience was a
sense of heightened perception and consciousness of the deeper reality of the world in which we
live in our ordinary experiences.17 The goal was not to transcend ordinary experience or to
escape reality, but to vivify it. Nor for the same reason, and as already mentioned, would Dewey
have agreed that music should be taught strictly for its own sake, as an academic subject
consisting of unadulterated sound divorced from the world and its problems.
Elsewhere in Art As Experience (1934), Dewey expressly warned that
compartmentalizing or spiritualizing music and the other arts out of connection with the objects
of concrete experience would render them meaningless, as would be the drama of Hamlet were
it confined to a single line or word with no context.18 Aesthetic experience was the focal
culmination of long, slow processes of maturation. Like a flash of lightening that illumines a
dark landscape, it was the manifestation of the continuity of an ordered temporal experience in
a sudden discrete instant of climax.19 Compartmentalization of the arts also led to a museum
culture that disfranchised the masses by contributing to the misperception that the arts were only

for the wealthy and intellectual elites who could afford and appreciate them. He rejected the
concept of connoisseurship that undergirded the aesthetic tradition for its snobbish elitism and
reliance on acknowledged masterworks and because it implied highly specialized training, all of
which rendered the masses overly dependent on experts and authority figures by creating the
impression that the ends of education were predetermined.20 Deweys was an explicitly political
philosophy in which education was conceived as liberation and preparation for democratic
citizenship rather than as social control through indoctrination of children to the status quo. The
latter only perpetuated the existing social order by privileging elites. Deweys educational aim
was instead to empower the masses to wrest some degree of control over the direction and
quality of their lives from those who would claim to rule in virtue of privilege or superior
abilities.21
Many of Deweys criticisms were thus aimed at social and economic elites and their
expert minions, although he of course acknowledged that there was a need for experts in a
democracy. The kinds of inquiry that he saw as vital to democracy, and to a democratic
education, often devolved upon experts who could help to create a critically informed and
engaged citizenry that could hold other experts and politicians more democratically
accountable.22 In a democracy, however, it was neither necessary nor desirable that education be
conceived primarily in terms of subject area specialization and the development of high levels of
expertise, as children would then lack the breadth of experience and practice grappling with
moral problems and dilemmas that were required if they were to think critically and act as moral
agents in contributing to the creation of a more just and humane society. As Dewey argued, It is
not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed
investigations; what is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the

knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns so that they could contribute intelligently
to the shaping of social values and public policy.23 Had Dewey still been alive by 1970, he would
have said that, because Reimer and others associated with the aesthetic education movement
described musical response as individualisticin terms of a strictly personal relation
between . . . selected works and a particular individualrather than as occurring within the
wider context of collective civilization, they failed to appreciate the way [italics his] in which
art exercises its humane function.24 Music and art education could contribute to social
amelioration in part by developing imagination, which made possible the envisioning of
solutions to social problems.25 This moral and political purpose of music education, however,
could not be fully realized as long as instruction was only concerned with the musically beautiful
and involving ecstatic eulogy of masterworks.26
Dewey regarded arts segregation from other forms of experience and everyday life as the
fundamental problem facing art philosophers and educators because it rendered opaque the
general significance of art and music in peoples lives. The educational task for [music
education] philosophers and teachers was thus two fold, to attempt to restore continuity between
the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events,
doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience,27 and to help
children and youth become more aware of the vested interests that would shape their
understandings of their world by reducing music and music education to indoctrination,
decoration, or entertainment, or by eliminating music and art from the schools altogether. In the
case of music, for example, children required a certain amount of musical knowledge and skill,
but it was equally important that they should learn about the political content and purposes of

music and art, for The first stirrings of dissatisfaction and the first intimations of a better future
are always found in works of art.28
For reasons that are addressed next, Reimer missed, or deliberately turned a blind eye on,
Deweys politics, although he was hardly alone in this. During the early Cold War, and owing to
the anti-communist hysteria and culture of fear that existed, many American music scholars and
composers took refuge in academia and formalism and for their own safety generally avoided
references to politics in their music or music instruction.29 And indeed, only a few years before
his death, Reimer shared with me that, although certainly aware of political developments during
those years, he and his musical colleagues kept their heads down[we were] too busy with
issues of teaching and learning music, etc. . . . Our tight musical world seemed cut off from
national issues.30 This, of course, was only an illusion! By the mid-1940s, Deweys social
democratic philosophy had already been deemed by government and the military industrial
complex as politically suspect and as potentially contributing to social instabilityand during
the 1950s a massive propaganda campaign based on a doctrine of national necessity was
mounted against him and progressive education as part of a larger effort to move the country
further to the political right through education reform.31 One insidious part of that propaganda
campaign against progressive education was a sedulously cultivated myth circulated during the
late 1950s and 1960s that the movement had died a natural death when in reality it was a victim
of politics.32

Jerome Bruner and The Control of Human Behavior

The interesting thing about Reimers avoidance of the politics of music and music
education at this time was that, although he thought that he was being politically neutral in

asserting that music should be taught as a discipline unto itself, for its intrinsic meaningsthat it
was a moral crime for teachers to relate music to politics and other modes of experience lest it
hinder students perception and appreciation of musics real import33his developing
philosophy was clearly influenced by the education reforms prompted by the 1958 National
Defense Education Act. As envisioned by the democratic capitalists driving education reform in
those years, the prevailing ideal for society and education was good management through
the development of trained intelligence and increasing specialization.34 The new emphasis in
education was to be on disciplinary knowledge, abstract thinking ability, and the development of
expertise, and including musical knowledge and expertise, so that the country could produce
more expert specialistsincluding expert musicians and artists35to better fight the Cold War in
defense of capitalism. In this political scheme, education was intentionally too fragmented and
teachers and their students too busy teaching or learning disciplinary knowledge and skills to
have much inclination or time for political dissatisfaction or protest.36
At some level Reimer must have known all of this, as the language employed in the first
edition of his A Philosophy of Music Education (1970) is clearly indebted to Jerome Bruner who,
in the late 1950s and 1960s, spearheaded the new education reforms. In his influential books The
Process of Education (1960) and On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (1962/1970), Bruner
had declared the death of Deweys philosophy and had ridiculed the idea of justifying subject
matter . . . in terms of its relation to the childs social activities.37 Dewey failed to understand
what knowledge is and how it may be mastered.38 Reimers call for music education reform
involving the rejection of progressive education and the development of a genuine [italics mine]
understanding about the nature of the major disciplines of knowledge39 is strikingly similar to
that of Bruner with respect to the pursuit of individual excellence through the increase of

10

intellectual potency and educational specialization.40 The overriding goal for music education,
Reimer echoed, was to narrow the gap between subjects taught in school and the essential
nature of the subjects as understood by those who use and know the subjects best.41 Expert
musicians and scholars knew best what children should learn.
In this Reimer was also following the lead of education philosopher and democratic
realist Harry Broudy (1958), who had declared that music experts and connoisseurs were the
only reliable source of standards and thus the measure of education success.42 This too was
entirely consistent with what Bruner had proposed in his latter book, in which he wrote of the
need for the best minds in each discipline to collaborate with teachers to continually revise and
refresh our curriculums.43 Broudys conception of enlightened connoisseurship with reference to
great music also assumed political neutrality, even though it clearly favored the children of the
rich who possessed the right cultural capital. As Dewey had long before observed, schools and
their programs were never politically neutral, and attempts to make them so through
compartmentalization of subjects, retreat into abstraction, and the pursuit of excellence through
the development of high levels of expertise and academic knowledge alone only rendered
education colorless for the majority of children resulting in indiscriminate complacency about
actual conditions and political impotence.44 Further, when taught without reference to their
social context and use; taken out of their social bearing, those subjects or disciplines become
wholly technical and abstract and thus subject to misuse.45
This arguably happened during the early Cold War when education was literally
conceived by Bruner and government as a form of social control through educational
specialization and vocational training! The key to exerting control over human behavior, Bruner
advised government, institutional leaders, and professionals, and whether in education or other

11

occupations, was to set the parameters for what Noam Chomsky later described as thinkable
thought46 so that the desired thoughts and behaviors become self-perpetuating and, because
endlessly repeated, assumed as natural.47 This too was something that Dewey had previously
warned about in The Public and Its Problems (1927/1946) as contributing to the political
disfranchisement of the masses; that thought runs in channels or habits of mind shaped by
tradition and through language and experience in institutional cultures that, left unchallenged,
became self-perpetuating because assumed as right, true, or natural, hence the importance in
education of questioning tradition and the status quo.48 Arts compartmentalization was
presented by him as a classic example of how educational specialization could, through force of
habit and long practice, cause people to wrongly assume that arts segregation from other modes
of experience was inherent in, or natural to, it rather than an imposition from without.49
Thinking deprived of its natural course, he wrote, takes refuge in academic specialism and
traditional and doctrinaire thinking.50
The salient point here is that Reimers philosophy, owing to its reliance on the language
and rhetoric of educational specialization, deliberatealbeit illusoryavoidance of politics, and
its longevity contributed significantly to the establishment of the parameters for thinkable
thought within the music teaching profession by convincing teachers that it was only natural
that music should be segregated from politics and other modes of experience. In this paper, and
drawing on Deweys philosophy, I have argued instead that knowledge of politics and other
subjects, and including history, philosophy, religion, and economics to name only a few, is often
essential if children and adults are to understand the power and significance of music in their
lives. Expressed slightly differently, knowing the who, what, when, where, and why of musical
ideas and practices is at least as important as knowing in and knowing how to make music if

12

children are to realize that much of what is presented to them as natural, true, or matter of fact is
only historical artifact, convention, myth, or illusory.51 Reimers primary contribution, then, and
consistent with education policy following the National Defense Education Act of 1958, was to
help concretize the belief among teachers that the focus of music instruction should be on
making or listening to music for its own sake while ignoring or downplaying its many social,
political, and moral dimensions. This worked to discourage teachers and their pupils from
questioning the status quo by failing to prepare them to critically analyze their musical worlds.
Music education was by no means unique in that regard, as all teachers felt compelled to define
their subjects in terms of disciplinary knowledge and the development of abstract thinking
ability, which was intended by prominent education reformers to help stabilize and unify the
country to fight the Cold War and, as explained herein, teaching children to think and act as
politically informed and engaged citizens during those years would have been perceived as
socialist and politically suspect.
My purpose is thus not to assign blame. It is just to observe that, like all of us, albeit
perhaps to varying extents, Reimers musical and educational values and ideas were shaped by
history, power, and politics in ways that he might not have realized and that they became so
ingrained in his thinking, and that of his students, as to be assumed as right and true and
therefore beyond question. Given the communist witch hunts in the United States during the
1950s, coupled with the fear of Soviet power and the very real possibility of Atomic war, it
would have taken an extraordinarily percipient and courageous person to question or otherwise
challenge official educational doctrine and the military industrial complex that was so invested in
the educational reforms of the period.52

13

Nor by the 1950s through to the 1990s did the profession have an intellectual tradition of
philosophical discussion and debate. Rather the opposite. As described by one music educator in
the late 1950s, American music teachers had a history of conforming to whatever seemed to
stand for the total philosophy of the schools.53 If anything, and this comment still applies today,
they were worried lest their efforts to adapt to the latest education reforms came short of the
mark. Teachers and their professional organizations were eager to conform to the expectations of
those controlling education, and their books and conferences were designed to promote more
effective orientation of instructional programs to accepted goals of formal education,54 hence
the rapid adoption of aesthetic education by American music teachers during the 1950s and
1960s.55 It was a politically correct and safe philosophy for the time.
It is important to remember that, in the later 1950s and 1960s, Reimer was almost alone
in developing a full blown philosophy of music education and that it was not until the
sociological and postmodern turns of the 1980s and 1990s that it was finally subjected to the
kinds of critical analysis that were warranted, and from which he benefitted. Reimer, we
discovered in the 1990s in his responses to his critics, was quite capable of intellectually
defending himself. And while those debates were sometimes fraught and overly personala sign
of the professions immaturitythey gave rise to his aforementioned and more expansive
understanding of music and music education as having social and political meanings, even if still
only secondary in importance.
Among the conclusions we might draw from this all too brief critical review of Reimers
philosophy and some of its social, historical, and political origins are, first, the value of criticism
itself, properly understood as the pursuit of truth (but not the truth) and understanding leading
to the creation of a better society, rather than intellectual warfare, and, second, of the importance

14

of humility in that quest for the reason that all of us, while hopefully well-intended, recognize
our own limitations and fallibility. We are all of us subject to forces and social and other
impediments in our own lives that might operate beneath our conscious awareness and that might
limit the pursuit of truth and social justice. Indeed, given the kinds of neoliberal inspired
education reforms promulgated to the world during the past several decades by supranational
institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), todays music teachers and academics are under
considerable, and I fear increasing, political pressure to conform to, or obey, what is accepted
as the dominant philosophy or purpose of the schools, which is economic. Today, all education is
driven by a doctrine of national economic necessity as governments view it as a tool for fostering
competition and thereby ensuring future economic success. And as might be expected, and as
happened during Reimers youth, rather than advocating that children should learn to critically
examine their world so that they can better understand and possibly resist this capitalist agenda
for all education, there have been renewed calls from the OECD and other organizations that
there should be a return to the old aesthetic rationale that music should be taught for its own
sake, which for the reasons presented herein is a weak justification for music in schools because
once again relegating it to the status of decoration and distraction.56

1 Bennett Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970).
2 Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education, 1.
3 Personal communication, 12 March 2009.
4 Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education, 91.
5 Bennett Reimer, What Music Cannot Do, Music Educators Journal 46, no. 1 (1959), 40-45.
6 Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education, 7.
7 Ibid., 7-8.
8 Bennett Reimer, Uncomfortable with Immanence: The Nature and Value of Music and Education as

Singular or Supplemental, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, eds. Wayne
Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 120.
9 Ibid., 125-126.
10 Ibid., 125.
11Personal communication, 12 March 2009.
12 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books,

1927/1946), 200.
13 Charles Leonhard and Robert W. House, Foundations and Principles of Music Education (2nd ed.)

(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959/1972), 75.

14 Charles Leonhard, The Philosophy of Music Education: Present and Future, in Comprehensive

Musicianship: The Foundation for College Education in Music (Washington, DC: Music Educators
National Conference, 1965), 43, quoted in Michael Mark, The Evolution of Music Education
Philosophy from Utilitarian to Aesthetic, Journal of Research in Music Education 30, no. 1 (1982),
19.
15 Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York: New American Library, 1953), 211,

quoted in Reimer, What Music Cannot Do, 45.

16 John Dewey, Art As Experience (New York: Perigee Books), 195.

17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 11, 24.
19 Ibid., 23-24.
20 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 200.
21 Ibid., 203-204.
22 Ibid., 208.
23 Ibid., 209
24 Dewey, Art As Experience, 346.
25 Ibid., 345-346.
26 Ibid., 12.
27 Ibid., 3.
28 Ibid., 345-346.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus&
Giroux, 2007).
29

30 Personal communication, 12 March 2009.

31 Paul Woodford, Music Education and Social Justice: Toward a Radical Political History and

Vision, in Debates in Music Teaching, eds. Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce (London, UK: Routledge,
2012), 88.
32 William Van Til, Is Progressive Education Obsolete, Saturday Review 45 (1962), 56-57, 82-84.

James L. Mursells biographer Vincent OKeeffe, for example, claimed that the progressive education

movement was a victim of its own success, that by the late 1950s its ideas and precepts were by then
commonplace and accepted by a majority of educators and that the movement had therefore become
obsolete. Vincent C. OKeeffe, James Lockhart Mursell: His Life and Contribution to Music Education
(Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York, 1970), 254-255.
33 Reimer, What Music Cannot Do, 43
34 Jerome Bruner, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. (New York: Atheneum, 1962/1970), 164,

162
35 Leonhard and House, Foundations and Principles, 40.
36 Bruner, On Knowing, 165.
37 Ibid., 121. This book went through ten reprints between 1965 and 1970 and was very influential on

the education reforms of the period.

38 Ibid.
39 Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education, 8.
40 Bruner, On Knowing, 163
41 Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education, 10
42 Harry Broudy, A Realist Philosophy of Music Education, in Basic Concepts in Music Education,

ed. Nelson. B. Henry (Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education, 1958), 84.
43 Bruner, On Knowing, 125.
44 John Dewey and John L. Childs, The Social-Economic Situation and Education, in The

Educational Frontier, ed. William H. Kilpatrick (New York and London: Century Co., 1933; Re-printed
in J. A. Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 8: 1933, rev. ed. Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 45.

45 Ibid., 59.

46Noam Chomsky, The Manufacture of Consent, in The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New

York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1987), 132. See Bruners On Knowing for a chapter actually entitled The
Control of Human Behavior,131-148.
47 Paul Woodford, Deweys Bastards: Mursell, Broudy, McMurray, and the Demise of Progressive

Education, Visions of Research in Music Education 21 (2012), 1-19, retrieved from

http://www.rider.edu/~vrme.
48 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 210.
49 Dewey, Art As Experience, 10, 20-21
50 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 168.
51 This idea, of course, was the late Christopher Smalls thesis in Musicking: The Meanings of

Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Dewey, however, made
similar arguments, albeit about education in general, long before him.
52 Even Dewey was politically suspect in the late 1940s and, in his dotage, was apparently assigned a

political watchdog by the Federal Bureau of Investigation! Fred Zimring, Notes and Documents: Cold
War Compromises: Albert Barnes, John Dewey, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 1 (1984), 87-100. See also Robert B.
Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
53 Thurber H. Madison, The Need for New Concepts in Music Education, in Basic Concepts in

Music Education, ed. Nelson B. Henry (Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education, 1958),
23-24.
54 Nelson. B. Henry, ed., Preface, in Basic Concepts in Music Education (Chicago: National Society

for the Study of Education, 1958), viii

55 Marie McCarthy and

J. Scott Goble, Music Education Philosophy: Changing Times, Music

Educators Journal 89, no. 1 (2002), 20.

56 Chris Philpott has said something similar in The Justification for Music in the Curriculum, in

Debates in Music Teaching, eds. Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce (London, UK: Routledge, 2012),
arguing that an over reliance on the soft justifications for educational music have ultimately
undermined it being taken seriously by pupils, teachers, and policy makers alike (p. 48).