Some of you might be thinking, “Okay Josh, I know you have a right to ride this high-horse, but you are just talking about music! Surely not everyone is this way! And besides, if a child/parent wants their experience to be limited and just for the thrill of music, then certainly they can do that! This is a free country!”

I would respond by saying that you are right on a couple points: it is a free country, and everyone is not this way.  You will find, across the globe and more specifically all over the west, examples of hard working, thoughtful, and patient parents who desire for their children to grow in music. But, this is not the majority view. I wouldn’t be talking about this unless I believed it was the majority view.

But I would just have to disagree on all other points. Let me make it by the analogy of “little Joe.”

Little Joe is graduating from high school, but he’s gone through six girlfriends, and spends his nights playing video games, and lives off of his parents income. His parents don’t understand why he can’t hold on to a job, but they figure he will mature enough to get to that point. But, little Joe is going to college! He pulls out a bunch of loans, starts his Freshman year, and he can’t keep any grades above a “C” average. Parents are still confused, but no matter… Joe finds himself a real sweet and beautiful partner, one that is different than all the other ones before, and so he decides to get in bed with her and move into her apartment. Oh, mom and dad don’t know that, but even if they did, they would say anything is better than staying at home! Joe, rashly, decides to pick up another loan at a jewelry store and on a whim decides to ask his sweet, beautiful girlfriend to get married. Some girls in this position can’t resist to say yes. So, they get married already with one child, but the marriage doesn’t last six months.

All the while, mom and dad still are perplexed by their son who is failing at life.

What I don’t think is that what the music teacher did when he was little is the source of all of these conundrums. I also don’t think that if a child has a music experience similar to the one I mentioned before, then they will fail at life. What I do think is that what the music teacher derived from the culture was naturally infused into the method of teaching and consequently was taught elsewhere. Remember, pedagogy is a reflection of how people are wanting to learn, and how they are accepting ideas. So what is naturally reflective of this type of teaching is common elsewhere in life.

The easy thing for me to say is that you will never find a child who (naturally) desires investing energy into hard things. But, what you will find is a mold-able being who naturally clings to the ways of the parents, and if not the parents then the culture, for the understanding of their own desires and ambitions.

The hard thing for me to say is that the culture has shaped parents and children to naturally only want what is obtainable and easy to find. That’s consumerism. It’s easy to learn guitar chords and read “cheat sheets” of music which use the English language to communicate what to play. It is vastly more difficult to teach a child how to read classical guitar music and understand the technique of playing said music without losing the child, because of what is naturally his/her (and the culture’s) desire to forgo any difficult doing.

Our culture is compartmentalized in everything, and we wonder why our lives are so crazy! We think that politics, government, music, faith, family, eating, playing, creating, parenting, and everything our lives are involved in are separate; the scandal is that they are not. Joe cannot play music for the same reasons he cannot understand how to love a woman in the right way. Joe mimics music making and also mimics love making. He has been taught that you can get away with the desired effect by using a cheap cop-out. All of this because he is busy, or he cannot live life fully if he takes his time and learns time-approved and painstakingly difficult skills; but they are skills.

Hopefully I have shown you an idea about music and about philosophy that can be easily taken to the next level. Challenge what you think about learning, and ask yourself, “What about my desires to learn and cultivate true art has been derived from faulty cultural thinking? What about about my thinking has been derived from faulty art?”