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Music in Secondary Schools

This paper focuses on music education including the importance of performance.

Mark H. Mullin (1991) contends, "The secondary years are vital. They are a period of great change for a young person" (p. 3). Secondary education must provide a great variety of experiences and settings for learning during this crucial period in the lives of its students. Harvard's Howard Gardner writes, "The key, I believe, is to devise learning environments in which students naturally come to draw upon their earlier ways of knowing and to configure those environments so that students can integrate these earlier forms of knowing with [new forms]" (1991, p. 180). It is also necessary to make these new environments as encouraging to the student as possible. As Mullin says, "Encouragement can help young people overcome their natural self-doubts" (1991, p. 69). By devising a competition and showcase for a broad range of students, this program offers participating schools, students, and teachers a vital opportunity for a different learning environment and a great deal of public encouragement for their efforts.

Focusing such a competition on jazz should be a particularly effective decision. This form of music gives both cultural importance to the event and a needed educational complexity to the experience for all concerned. It presents a large-scale occasion to highlight work, talents, and learning that might otherwise go unrecognized. It also focusses on an art form that is particularly appropriate to the secondary level.

Jazz is an especially important subject for inclusion in the secondary school music curriculum. Mullin contends that an "essential in any secondary school curriculum is a grounding in one's own culture" (p. 99), and jazz is the most uniquely American of all music forms. Its complex rhythmic patterns and syncopated improvisations, deriving from blues and African American roots, are particular to the history of the Unite...

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Music in Secondary Schools. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:20, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704369.html