To everyone out there interested in my music: my Masters’ project, a full-length recording entitled asleep through 1984, is now available for purchase for only $10 (+ shipping if applicable)! This is a diverse recording featuring modern jazz compositions for small ensemble, a big band composition, piano improvisations, and songs in a mixture of folk and jazz idioms. Liner notes and lyrics are available via the link at the top of this page, and three of the ten tracks are available for previewing at your convenience here. Contact me for purchasing information.
Just a note – some things I saw in the news this morning (http://www.patriotpost.us/):
In 2001, when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords switched from the GOP to the Democrats, giving the Senate majority to the Democrats, Arlen Specter publicly opposed the move as unethical and unfair to the voters. “I plan to propose a rule change which would preclude a future recurrence of a senator’s change in parties, in midsession, organizing with the opposition, to cause the upheaval which is now resulting,” he said then.
“I am staying a Republican because I think I have an important role — a more important role — to play there. I think the United States desperately needs a two-party system. It is the basis of politics in America. I think each of the 41 Republican senators, in a sense, and I don’t want to overstate this, is a national asset, because if one was gone you would only have 40. The Democrats would have 60 and they would control all of the mechanisms of government.” –Sen. Arlen Specter in March
It’s good to know that someone is taking in the big picture.
“At the rate that Obama and the liberals are going, when it comes to piling up the national debt, nationalizing banks and major companies, scuttling our missile defense system, reaching out to Islamic and Communist tyrants, funding ACORN, AmeriCorps and Hamas, discussing nuclear disarmament with Russia at the same time that Iran, Pakistan and North Korea are gearing up, talking tough to Israel while currying favor with the Arabs and the Islamists, I have no idea what will be left to salvage a year-and-a-half down the road.”–columnist Burt Prelutsky
I thought it might be fun to post a little of my recent work here. This is the outcome of a few months’ research in jazz and American educational systems. It is far less detailed than I would like, but I cover a few high points and a lot of the goodies some folks might want to know further are in the sources I reference in the discussion and at its conclusion. Continue at your own peril.
Introduction
At the outset I had no idea what sort of paper this would become. Given the twofold assignment including, first, a defense of jazz education in the American public school system and, second, an explanation of my philosophy of jazz instruction, I hit the books in order to put jazz and education into historical perspective in my own mind. From this exercise I began to be able to frame answers to the assigned questions, but the answers turned out differently from what I had expected. Along the way, many elements of my own perspective have shifted. I trust that the informal style of this paper will not detract from the reader’s opinion of my research or of the conclusions reached; no other way of presenting the information seemed sensible to my mind.
So that the reader will not be unduly surprised or confused, I will initially provide a brief outline of the important areas to be covered in the ensuing discourse. The first segment is an attempt at a definition of jazz as a musical style and a definition of education as it is encapsulated by the American school system. We cannot proceed unless we know precisely what it is that we are talking about. In the second segment I will discuss the pros and cons of teaching jazz as a musical style. Following that, in the third segment I will attempt to give a satisfactory answer to the question “Why should jazz be taught in our schools?” Finally, another question will need to be discussed (and this question may best be left as a surprise), and answering that question will lead to the discussion of a personal philosophy of jazz instruction.
Defining Our Terms
Before beginning, I must make the reader aware that I approach the subject matter (and all other things) from a decidedly Biblical / Christian world-view. As the way one defines a problem tends to contain the problem’s solution, the reader ought to be helped in understanding my work through a simple consideration of what such a world-view entails. For a good summary of such a framework I might recommend a perusal of the Gospels(1) and a look through Francis Schaeffer’s work entitled The God Who is There.
The definition of jazz as a musical style has historically been a slippery eel in the hands of musicians, critics, historians, encyclopedists, and anyone else who happened to be in the creek at the time. To give the reader an idea of the concepts which have been put forward to this end, I have compiled the following short list of attempts:
From Richard Cook’s Jazz Encyclopedia:
“[Jazz] came into being in the early 20th century as a music drawn from a number of different sources . . . personified by two principal characteristics: a syncopated rhythmical element which has come to be called ’swing’, and some improvisational input . . . If both of these features are missing, it is difficult to see how the music can be described as jazz.”(2)
From Charley Gerard’s Jazz in Black and White:
“For a short while, many Americans, both blacks and whites, considered jazz to be a form of white dance music.”(3)
From Grover Sales’ Jazz: America’s Classical Music:
“Jazz is an improviser’s art.”(4) (He goes on to explain what he means for about 30 pages.)
Alfred Appel, in Jazz Modernism, links early jazz with movements in literature and art, and is thus able to use phrases such as “Hemingway’s jazz modernism” in referring to a brief dialogue from “The Killers”.(5)
The Wikipedia entry entitled “Jazz” offers various definitions, some as specific as Cook’s above and some more broad than Sales’ definition (i.e., “jazz is a construct”).(6)
As a player of jazz compositions and an improviser myself, I have my own ideas about the nature of jazz. Because jazz is an improviser’s art, as was stated above, every new player pulls from an existing oral tradition, largely in the form of recordings, and contributes a new mixture, a new flavor, a new recipe to that same tradition. Inasmuch as jazz is a language, then, because it is still a living language, it undergoes a process of change. Latin doesn’t change because it is dead, at least as far as languages go, but new amended English dictionaries must still be researched and published year after year. When a language is no longer in common use, its symbols become as solid as those etched in the Rosetta Stone. But because the “jazz conversation”, if you will, is still raging around the dinner table, elements of the language are still being added and subtracted, combined and recombined.
In a sense, jazz is the music of the industrial age—perhaps I should say, one important music of the industrial age. The classical tradition in music composition also represents and reflects the industrial age, much like the visual art tradition, but both of these have nearly lost contemporary audiences completely because they have ceased operating, in their relative spheres, with symbols that ordinary people recognize. In much the same way that the urban industrial culture alienates children from their parents, employees from their employers, people from their land and their families, and estranges us all from one another, art and music coming from the classical tradition today tend to alienate viewers and listeners from themselves through many layers of abstraction. Jazz survives today, more successfully than either of the latter artistic traditions, because it is a music made in rebellion against the principles undergirding urban industrial life. In this sense, jazz is the place where the individual trumps the mass; where each voice matters; where the acts of listening and communicating are invested with importance; where there exists a semblance of democracy; where technical skill and emotional involvement are not antithetical to one another in theory or in practice. Popular music today is for the most part mass music; it is woven from the fabric of mass consumer culture and is generally simple enough (and often inane enough) to be “worn” by the vast majority of persons who have enough money to consume it, and “used” by them as background noise (or, what is more likely, “soundtracks”) for their disappointingly uncinematic lives. Music from the classical tradition, as I have mentioned above, is completely foreign to most Americans (as are the technology they use as a matter of course from day to day and the systems that form the underpinning of their lives), and as a rule contemporary pieces are very rarely heard except by academicians, who feel obligated by their advanced degrees and studies of atonal systems to say something redeeming in defense of these sorts of compositions. Jazz music might be said to occupy a shifting middle-ground in our time, an art which is very much alive and which has a substantial (if not very large) non-musician following.
Considered from the standpoint of the Christian, jazz contains both promise and danger as an art form. Much of the remainder of this work will consist in unpacking that idea, but for now, suffice it to say that the history of jazz is, in many respects, the tragic story of the effects of unmitigated excess in all aspects of human life, and thus a reflection of the twentieth century writ large. An art so emotional and so individually oriented puts a great deal of stress on performance, and generously rewards, through enlargement, the ego of the successful. This enlargement of the ego, or the accumulation of personal pride, is fundamentally against the Biblical understanding of the place of humanity in the created order and is a principal cause of other sin. This kind of pride is ultimately that which exalts itself over against God in justifying whatever it is we would like to do with our lives, our minds, or our time. On the other hand, jazz musicianship emphasizes listening and community (at least among the musicians) in a way that most modern music does not, and such an emphasis is needed in our day to counter the corporatist or statist tendencies which pervade American life. A fuller discussion of these matters will be found below, but this is enough to introduce the topic.
For our purposes, then, jazz is an improviser’s art, an oral tradition which began in a combination of African and Western European music, and which, over time, has folded into its dialectic many other musical traditions, including (but certainly not limited to) blues, rock, Eastern music and instruments, American folk music and instruments, and elements of modern classical tradition.
If the rather broad definition above constitutes a working definition of jazz, what must a working definition of education include? Interestingly enough, that topic has also been the subject of many debates in the last few centuries. I am afraid that what the American public schools have settled on as a proper definition must be inadequate at best (having been unable to locate one), and that has a great deal to do with my view of the whole matter in question. In fact, I searched the nooks and crannies of the Department of Education website for some time (www.ed.gov) and I could not find a definition of education anywhere. I had the same difficulty at the NEA website (www.nea.org). I suppose that they assume we all agree on precisely what the word means. One of the things I have discovered during my research is that obtaining a satisfactory definition of what education is—that is, exactly what is supposed to happen in a school—from the educative establishment itself is rather difficult. The more probing I did, that is, the further I fell down the rabbit-hole, the more unsettling information I learned.
To get a perspective on the changing winds in American education, one indispensable resource I’ve consulted is Elwood Cubberley’s The History of Education, originally published in 1920. Around this time in history, the course of American public education was steadying out in the direction it has maintained to the present day. In discussing the shift to what he calls “vocational education”, Cubberley makes the following important and prophetic observation:
“In 1917 the American Congress made the beginnings of what is destined to develop rapidly into a truly national system of vocational education for the boys and girls of secondary-school age in the United States. This new addition to the systems of public instruction now provided is one which in time will bring returns out of all proportion to its costs. Without it the national prosperity and happiness would be at stake, and the position the United States has attained in the markets of the world could not possibly be maintained.”(7) (emphasis mine)
What is he talking about? What’s the difference between “vocational education” and “education”? How is the international supremacy of the US at stake? Note, by the way, that Cubberley is writing during the most prosperous period our nation had ever experienced to date, economically speaking. What he is referring to is the shift of the economy to mass industrial production for coal- and steel-based markets, upon which we were shortly to become extraordinarily wealthy beyond all expectation in this country. It was necessary at that time that we stop educating primarily to develop the cognitive faculties and start using the educational system to accustom people to routine tasks, discipline, and unquestioning obedience at an early age so that, when the vast majority of the “educated” went to work in the factories, railways, and mine shafts (and as we anticipated more and more of that type of work to continue to be created in such an economy), there would be little “competition”, comparatively little “entrepreneurship”, and comparatively little organized rebellion to impede the progress of the market. On the face of it, I know that all of these things seem unbelievable to most Americans, and I found the facts just as unbelievable when I began to research them. As unpleasant as it may seem, what I’ve just written is only the tip of the iceberg. In Cubberley’s work, one can read in the final segment (“The Future”) his assessment that education was then (about 1920) beginning to serve the advancement of the state, and must be controlled and directed by the State to that end in order to ensure “safe” democracy.(8) In order to get a much fuller and clearer picture of what this means, I direct the reader’s attention to a book written by a lifelong public educator (in the New York school system), John Taylor Gatto, entitled The Underground History of American Education. This book, in its entirety, is available to read for free on the internet and is more than worth the several hours that a cursory reading requires.(9) For a bit lighter fare, the reader is directed to the NEA bulletin from 1928 (also available on the internet) which officially documented the transfer from cognitive education to what might be called “affective” education.(10) It is buried in “edu-speak”, but with a bit of history under the belt the reader should be able to see some of the important changes in that document.
Collecting even a summary of all the developments in American public education that have brought us to where we are now would require a paper several times this length. I trust that the reader will do his own research, following the trail from where I’ve suggested he start, and, in the meantime, consider the well-known and often-reported statistics regarding the incredible decline in American literacy and the increasing inability of the “man on the street” to tell one anything of importance (for example: Who was George Washington? When was the Declaration of Independence signed? I call the late-night talk show hosts as witnesses…) as a rough indicator of my diagnosis that education is not presently directed toward the assimilation and integration of knowledge and the development of the mental faculties, but toward producing a docile and, for all practical purposes, illiterate and historically ignorant class of people who, if you’ll pardon the somewhat crass illustration, don’t mind working at comparatively mindless tasks during the best of their waking hours as long as they can watch football on the weekend with a bucket of chicken.
From the Christian point of view this sort of “education”, vocational or otherwise, is completely unacceptable. God originally created man to work the ground, and through such work, along with animal husbandry, to depend on the providence of God for his food and livelihood (Genesis 1:28, 2:15, 4:4), learning all the skills necessary to live on the land. Urbanization, which was always ultimately an attempt by mankind to erect a stronghold for man against God, is among the first sins committed in the history of fallen mankind according to the Scripture (Genesis 4:16-17, 10:8-14, 11:1-9). Consider this fact: nothing I’ve argued so far in this document can be known, verified or challenged by anyone apart from a study of history and literature. That sort of education is extraordinarily important! In the Christian world-view, history is of great value because God has a purpose and history is headed somewhere. What He commanded and ordained in the past is not only valuable but is necessary for understanding what is happening in our own day and how we are to live.
Without such perspective one cannot make any valid judgments about any action, trend, movement, art, or anything else, because one is simply afloat on a sea of independent facts. For example, it is easy to see by way of comparison that a naturalistic world-view (that is, a world-view based on science in a material universe without God) provides no basis at all for moral or aesthetic judgment—even our minds, according to such a view, are the products of time and chance. Even the contents of the mind which we call “rational” are actually, according to a naturalistic perspective, a product of irrational processes (which is an absurdity) and thus, by derivation, our thoughts cannot be said to have any sort of meaning except to ourselves. Logic as a universally applicable system of thought or language is completely unjustified. From such a vantage point, I don’t think it difficult to observe that making an argument for any sort of education, or making an argument for or against anything at all, is not only useless but impossible.(11) Neither education nor anything else can even be assigned a definite value in relation to other institutions or things. After all I’ve said, it ought not surprise the reader to find out that just such a naturalistic world-view is what is inculcated in every child who attends an American public school. Just pick up a “social studies” or science textbook from a secondary school and read for yourself.
As I approach the issue from a Biblical standpoint, and I believe that our rational minds were created by a rational God, who has purposes in history, I can at least argue for or against the educational system and make some sense of the issue. Since the organs of the U.S. public education system offer no definition of what it is we suppose they are doing with our tax dollars, I went to Webster’s for help. Frighteningly enough, I discovered the following:
“The act or process of educating; the result of educating, as determined by the knowledge, skill, or discipline of character, acquired; also, the act or process of training by a prescribed or customary course of study or discipline; as, an education for the bar or the pulpit; he has finished his education.
To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge.
– H. Spenser.”(12) (emphasis mine)
The definition itself isn’t so bad (other than being rather vague), but Webster’s offers a quote from Herbert Spenser below the definition which only hints at Spenser’s view, a view which was largely adopted by the American public education system and is, in practice, incompatible with the definition above the quote. Spenser was one of the first to suggest that education of the mind in the classics and in Western culture and tradition would be useless to the modern citizen, wholly inapplicable to the industrial life society would require him to lead. I need not tell you, I’m sure, that I heartily disagree with Spenser. For our purposes, I will define education according to Webster’s dictionary above, but I reserve the right to qualify “knowledge”, “skill”, and “discipline of character” according to my world-view, and not the view obviously promulgated by the American school system. For example: “knowledge” can mean either “all the knowledge necessary to sort checks for an imaging process at a bank” or “knowledge of history and the great art and literature of humanity, providing perspective on life, aiding in understanding, and providing the resources for critical thinking and sound judgment.” I leave it to the reader to judge between them.
Is Jazz Good For You?
Armed with a basic definition of jazz and education, I am ready to proceed to the inquiries at hand. Before I asked myself whether jazz instruction ought to take place in schools, I had to determine whether jazz instruction and dissemination is a good thing in the first place. What is at stake in teaching jazz to our children?
Art, that is, art of any kind, communicates something about mankind to the rest of mankind. Humans are unique in the created order because they are able to create, being made in the image of God, whose first and fundamental act (as far as we are concerned) was that of creation (Genesis 1:1). What we create defines our culture. We can see in artifacts what things, persons, and ideas an older culture held in high regard; we learn about their way of life and what they valued. In much the same way we communicate to one another in our own culture what we value (and what we loathe, fear, etc.) through our artwork, and in the process we continually redefine and reshape that culture. Because art communicates something, by its nature it communicates something about God as well, whether what it communicates is in actuality true or false. As Christians, we desire that our artwork communicate primarily the glory of God, and exemplify the Biblical world-view concerning mankind, which is historical, purposeful and redemptive, rather than ahistorical, random and destructive. Unfortunately, a Christian subculture (sub in every sense of the suffix) exists in America which does not at all promote the Christian world-view, but puts a false image—whether it’s prosperity, cheesy sentimentality, or rebellion—in its place, because that sort of substitution seems to sell a lot more books and CDs. But that’s a subject for another paper.
What does jazz communicate about man in American culture? It’s difficult to answer the question if you’ve got only a B diminished scale and no historical foundation. (More on that in the next section.) At very least, jazz communicates something positive about race relations, because the musical form itself accomplished a great deal of societal “leveling”; jazz communicates something positive about freedom through the emphasis on improvisation rather than playing from a written score; jazz communicates something positive about democracy and the value of the individual by its very nature. Jazz also communicates something negative in all of its connotations with bars and brothels (and the sorts of acts that would be performed to those swingin’ rhythms); jazz communicates something negative in the total disregard for form which prevailed upon many after Ornette Coleman’s radical example; jazz communicates something negative in a historical sense also because many of the popular tunes from the 20’s and 30’s we now call “standards” are, at best, drivel (by any songwriting standard), or at worst, crude distortions of human love and sexuality. Clearly, if we are going to teach jazz to children, or to anyone, for that matter, we must be aware of the implications the music has had in our culture over the last century and be careful in how we instruct them to use the tools we are handing to them.
For example: in recently observing a public high school jazz band rehearsal, I was appalled to discover that one of the arrangements the 14- and 15-year old boys and girls were working on was entitled “The Stripper”, and the reader can be sure that the music was more than a match for the title. What such music communicates about God and about man is not too difficult to discover, given a little thought. But that wasn’t enough. One of the adult authorities present at the rehearsal instructed the band to relax the swing a bit, and gave the following illustration, which was followed by cynical laughter from the guys and a few blushes from some of the young girls, to press the point home: “A stripper makes more money the longer it takes for her to undress.” If the whole scene I’ve just described is not a public endorsement of immorality, for which authorities over youth ought to be ashamed (and would have been as late as 50 years ago), I don’t know what is. At very least it is a display of total indifference toward something which is destructive to human sexuality and the family, and which God hates. If this sort of thing is what is meant by “jazz education”, then by no means should this course be pursued in our schools or anywhere!
Happily, I hold out hope, because the above anecdote is certainly not all there is to jazz. But when teaching jazz music, even if one is not using immoral material, there are some other pitfalls to be avoided in order for the instruction to be beneficial. I will briefly outline these below.
1. Encouraging a student to improvise and invest himself emotionally in his instrument and in the performance of the art can lead easily to egotism and laziness, particularly when the student displays any degree of skill in the art. Those developments can lead to further excess in moral life (a fact to which only too many jazz greats of the past attest). This kind of problem must be tempered with doses of humility and teaching on moderation in order for the student to derive any real benefit from the study of jazz.
2. Jazz represents “freedom from” in a number of different ways, particularly when the student comes from a classical background. As the student gains some facility, he may relax at some point (especially after hearing Ornette Coleman) and rest on his small achievements, allowing bad technique and a bit of random chance to get him through, rather than working to invest the notes he plays with significance. This problem must be tempered by a continual focus on self-discipline and self-control, and laziness (and bad to mediocre performances) ought not be encouraged or rewarded, as it all too often is in the public education system.
3. Music of the Western tradition, that is to say, “classical” music, must be studied, played and understood at some level in order for the student in question to have any kind of grip on what jazz music is and how its “language” operates. (This is a variation on, “You have to know the rules in order to break them.”) The student needs to develop some knowledge of the history of Western culture and the tradition of Western music in order to hear jazz properly and find where he “fits” into the musical stream. This presents a barrier in many situations as far as public schooling is concerned, which will be discussed below.
Jazz also has value in what can be taught through studying it, and some of the applications are apparent in what has already been said. Playing in a small jazz group teaches humility and restraint, or ought to teach these things over time, through having to participate in music that everyone is making and learning to improvise contributions in a tasteful and respectful way. This practice promotes the music as a whole, not anyone’s ego in particular. Further, the study of jazz, like other musical disciplines, is just that—a discipline. Without patience and a certain degree of self-control, one cannot get there from here. Another benefit of jazz study has to do with its qualities as an oral tradition or language: the student learns a form of communication with others, and this form requires concentration and listening, both valuable life skills which are unfortunately not often taught alongside the English language. If all these things are pursued, and the pitfalls avoided, and the music composed and played by the student or professional jazz musician is pursued from a purposeful, redemptive, Biblical world-view, then I would conclude that such jazz is a music being made to the glory of God and has value as art in defining our culture and communicating with others. Thus, jazz can be good for you, and good for us all, but it is not necessarily so.
Why Should Jazz Be Taught In Our Schools?
Jazz should be taught in our schools for the same reason that all the arts should be taught in our schools: because art is one of the only refuges available to children in the system whose daily bread is meaningless worksheets and memorization of unrelated factoids. Children in schools (and this includes most Christian / private schools, which typically operate according to the same practice as the public institutions) are essentially kept busy doing very little for some of the most productive years of their lives. Many school children, by the time they get halfway through junior high, treat their band director as a surrogate parent because they hardly ever see the real ones, but they see the band director two to three hours a day or more. The arts allow the children to learn something meaningful and interesting, unlike the majority of their schoolwork, unless they are fortunate enough to have an engaging and “rebellious” teacher here or there along the way. So the short answer is that jazz should be taught in the schools because it is one of the only routes that the child’s mind can follow out of the pit of forced-schooling, lowest-common-denominator boredom into the realms of significant learning and application.
Why CAN’T Jazz Be Taught In Our Schools?
The bad news is that if jazz is to be taught as I have outlined in the previous section, the American public schools are the least-equipped applicants for the job. Much effort has been made to keep fine arts instruction in public schools, and the Tanglewood Symposium of 1967 was instrumental (no pun intended) in getting jazz accepted as a legitimate art form as far as the Education Department was concerned. These are good things in themselves, but in light of the problems in American public schooling the “improvements” look like band-aids on a severed limb.
In the first place, as I mentioned earlier, the American public education system is not designed or operated to produce “educated” children, even according to the vague Webster’s definition above. If the Department of Education has no interest in what used to be called a “liberal education” for the vast majority of American people, we cannot expect them to teach jazz properly any more than we can expect them to teach Homer and Herodotus at all.
In the second place, even if the American school system was geared, as an institution, to highly educate our children, all of their textbooks and all their curricula are written and designed from a totally secular, naturalistic (godless) world-view. If you recall, I alluded to the implications of such a world-view earlier in the paper. The schools operate as though they leave the “religious” instruction to the parents in the home, but over the course of the 20th century the schools have deliberately ousted Judeo-Christian spirituality and morality from their environments in one court case after another. History (or “Social Studies”) textbooks are written to deliberately obscure the role that Christianity played in the founding of our own nation, and countless other important things are left out of all sorts of accounts. The books are written obtusely on purpose, so that there is often no logical narrative to follow (see America Revised by Frances Fitzgerald for more on America’s textbook situation). If history is being revised, and taught in such a way that the student retains little of what he did learn, how can any knowledge be integrated? How can the student have any perspective on what he is being taught? Why should any of it matter? The answer is that, from a naturalistic standpoint, it doesn’t. Humanity is the product of an accident in time and chance, and purpose has no place in our vocabulary. Reality is ultimately irrational and it matters little what any of us does. Any teaching of information, or of art, built on such a foundation, is absolutely bound to fail in its aim, because there is no ground upon which to convince a student that any of their work or understanding matters except in the extremely superficial sense of temporal “reward” (perhaps in the form of a gold star) and “punishment” (which practically doesn’t exist anymore in public schools). One cannot begin with naturalism and arrive at mastery of any skill or art without an extreme inconsistency in their world-view along the way. The testimony of modern American life is that most kids see through to the futility of the godless approach early on and begin to act like the animals they are told they are as soon as they are given opportunity. This is not as it should be.
What Can We Do?
By way of application, I am in agreement with John Gatto, whose book I referred to earlier, in thinking that there is no possibility of reforming American public education. The institution and the bureaucracy that goes with it is a monstrous ship with its rudder fixed in place. No single person or lobbyist group can assail it. The system is one of the major sources of what is fashionably called “job creation” in the United States. Like the government itself, from here it can only grow. What I advocate will probably be considered radical, but I request that the reader not break faith with me so close to the end.
Institutional school, run top-down by a centralized entity, cannot function in the interest of children’s education. Like any other system or business, it can only function in its own interest and, try to thwart it where you will, it will continue to do so. Prior to centralized compulsory education, people learned music, jazz, reading, writing, speaking and everything else without it. That is to say, for the vast majority of history, including the portion that produced Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, even Lincoln, formal education was almost out of the picture entirely with the exception of some religious Universities. Somehow we managed. Many people are realizing this and trying something different, often at great cost to themselves.
If schools are to be successful as institutions, they must be in local hands, that is, the hands of the parents themselves (or better yet, drop the institution altogether and school at home). The local school boards should have their choice of curriculum and should have no requirements, religious or otherwise, foisted upon them by the state. Anyone who has studied standardized tests knows that those things are a crock (and I’ve taken plenty); not only do they reveal nothing about what a person really knows, they can be altered relatively easily to skew the results one way or another when the public school curriculum is centralized. Children are capable of far more than what they have to show for twelve years in the public school factory; the recent Classical School movement and the home-schoolers are bearing that out with hard facts. Americans must make the hard choice and pull kids out of the schools, taking them home or building their own. I realize that this is made doubly difficult through the breakdown of the family (also a product of the industrial society and compulsory schooling), but we quite literally have no other choice. If we would have our children learn the arts, if we would teach them jazz, we cannot depend on the public school system to do it. Jazz, like most other things, is best taught by imitation of someone who has mastered the art. Practically teaching a student who desires to learn in the first place becomes a good deal less complicated and fraught with disaster if one-on-one instruction via imitation is the method used.
Finally, we will only give our children a solid, rational foundation upon which to build and integrate knowledge if we teach them according to the Biblical world-view. From the perspective of the true Christian, rationality has its basis in a rational Creator God; because God created all things and decreed all history, the universe and every particular fact in it, through all time, has purpose; each event is in a relationship with all other events, a relationship that matters; music matters not simply because it consists of pleasant (or unpleasant) sounds, but because God designed a universe in which, miraculously, tones can be sounded together in relationships that make sense to our ears, touch our spirits, and bring glory to the God who made them. If there is no return to the Biblical understanding of humanity, there can be no return to freedom, to real education, or to meaning in life. There is only matter, and then we’re gone. In fact, trying to teach music from that standpoint reveals to any observer a most unpleasant inherent contradiction. What draws us into our favorite performances, the greatest solos, the most incredible improvisations and compositions, is something which transcends time and our temporal experience in the music, drawing us outward toward a greater reality which also transcends time and experience. We cannot properly teach anyone the significance of music, jazz or otherwise, whether we like it or not, without bringing them to the throne of the transcendent God. And, no doubt, that is one of the best reasons to teach jazz.
1 – From the New Testament, the books Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
2 – Cook, Richard, Jazz Encyclopedia (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 315.
3 – Gerard, Charley, Jazz in Black and White (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998), 1.
4 – Sales, Grover, Jazz: America’s Classical Music (London: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 11.
5 – Appel, Alfred, Jazz Modernism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 15-16.
6 – “Jazz” at Wikipedia, Accessed online October 19 2008. Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz
7 – Cubberley, Elwood. The History of Education (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 811.
8 – Ibid., 833-839.
9 – Gatto, John Taylor, The Underground History of American Education, Accessed online October 19 2008. Available from http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
10 – The NEA report can be read here, along with other interesting tidbits: http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/cardprin.html
11 – For more on this, see Cornelius Van Til’s Christian Apologetics or Gordon Clark’s Religion, Reason and Revelation.
12 – “education”, Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Available from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/education
Sources Consulted
Appel, Alfred. Jazz Modernism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Cook, Richard. Jazz Encyclopedia. London: Penguin Books, 2005.
Cubberley, Elwood. The History of Education. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.
Davis, Francis. Jazz and its Discontents. Da Capo Press, 2004.
Dewey, John. ed. Reginald D. Archambault. John Dewey on Education. New York: The Modern Library, 1964.
Dewey, John. ed. Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander. The Essential Dewey Volume 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education. Accessed online October 19 2008. Available from http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
Gerard, Charley. Jazz in Black and White. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998.
James, William. ed. Giles Gunn. Pragmatism and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
Sales, Grover. Jazz: America’s Classical Music. London: Prentice-Hall, 1984.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. “education”. Accessed online October 19 2008. Available from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/education
Wikipedia. “Jazz”. Accessed online October 19 2008. Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz
So what else is new, right? Anyway, the MySQL server at my free host got fried and my more recent blog entries were lost. So now I’m back here at the WordPress domain. Until I’ve got a safer option, I think this is where I’ll stay. Thanks for reading.
Unfortunately, my much-awaited classical education conference report has taken a back seat this week. It’s not alone.
We’ve taken the offensive, so to speak, against Crohn’s Disease, and the first week of the battle has been rather difficult. The doctors have told us that a $20,000 dollar surgery is her only option – that is, apart from semi-permanent large doses of steroids to suppress the problem. They have also told us that they don’t think her intestinal disease is food-related. Reading a number of books that challenge that assumption with empirical research (Rinkel, Theron Randolph, and others) finally gave me the level of confidence necessary to push ahead implementing a diet strategy as the beginning of the war on disease. The diet comes from Dr. Shrader in Santa Fe, whom we will soon be seeing for immunotheraphy. Since we live in the same house and eat meals together most of the time, and since moral support never hurts, I have opted to diet with Jen. I also thus function as a “control” for the experiment. We began Monday, June 30.
Were we in for a surprise. I read in Dr. Shrader’s “green book” that “any strict elimination diet will make most people feel better. However, there will often be an initial period when you will not feel well. This generally lasts for only 2 to 4 days, and then you’ll feel better. This is partly due to the removal of foods to which you are intolerant (”food withdrawal”). I should warn you, however, that those of you with severe food problems might feel terrible for a few days.” Even this didn’t fully prepare me for what happened. Perhaps this will give you an idea of what to expect if you try something so outrageous.
With everything else I’d been reading, I thought to myself, “If her problem is food-related, it ought to resurface if we take the right food away.” To the best of my knowledge, I was right.
As per the instructions, we stopped eating wheat and other glutinous grains, sugars, dairy products, and fermented / mold-prone foods and drinks (among a few other things). Ideally, Jen should not be taking prednisone either, but she still is because the weaning-off is a slow, incremental process. Nonetheless, she’s not taking much prednisone. Up until the day we began the diet, she felt great (and had for months).
Day 1 (Monday, June 30): In the morning we felt good. I think we skipped breakfast, we had fish and broccoli for lunch, and bell peppers stuffed with beef for dinner (with a side of radishes roasted with potatoes). Nothing out of the ordinary. All of those are veggies and meats that we normally eat. But by evening, just after dinner, her cramping pain began to return and by nightfall it was almost as bad as her initial “flare-up” in November of last year. She was more or less incapacitated. As for me, I had a HUGE headache that came on gradually in the evening and reached its height around midnight. Jen was awake all night with the pain and nausea, as most of her prescription pain medication had no effect. It was almost exactly like the night we first went to the ER. The only reason we probably didn’t have to go to the ER is because she was still on prednisone. The pain kept her up until the morning of day 2.
Day 2 (July 1): Jen didn’t eat all day. I was fatigued and lethargic throughout the afternoon but I did find something to eat for lunch (chicken broth I think). By night, she felt a little better and was able to have some chicken. She had to remain in one position, and very still, to ward off the nausea. Even at night on day 2, she was taking her most powerful narcotic to stay asleep because of the pain.
Day 3 (July 2): We both felt a bit better in the morning, but virtually all my muscles ached for most of the day and Jen still had the cramping pains recurring every 5-10 minutes (not as severe as at first). Zucchini, with almond butter, served as a quick lunch before we headed to our pastor’s house for a steak and potato dinner. The food went down easier for me, but Jen was still having a bit of a hard time feeling “up to” eating. She more or less stopped taking pain medication by dusk.
Day 4 (July 3): from that time until now (Day 8), things have steadily improved. We’re both feeling more or less normal again. Jen isn’t having any Crohn’s-type pain (or any pain at all for that matter) and I’m not perpetually exhausted. Learning how to eat on this diet is still an adventure and a challenge, but we will know our vegetables before it’s over. We’re supposed to keep all that food I mentioned above “eliminated” for about a month, and then begin to add foods back in one at a time, playing detective to try to pinpoint possible problem foods. At the same time, Jen will (God willing) be receiving LDA immunotherapy treatment from Dr. Shrader, which should (over time) eliminate the dietary issues by re-training the immune response. Or at least that’s the shortest summary possible I could give you of the process.
As I thought back over this experience, I was struck by how it compared with the onset of her symptoms on the first place. This may have been a “food” thing all along, but because of my blind spot (and the blind spot of the medical community) to the effect of diet on disease, I couldn’t see it. When you consider all the facts, it’s difficult to call it coincidence. To review my thoughts:
The first day she had a flare-up, she had eaten nothing but a bowlful of salsa with corn chips and an orange. No wheat. No dairy. It scared us because the thing literally came out of nowhere, with no warning, which is exactly what happened Monday night. When the next bad attack came on, with the same sort of symptoms, she was unable to eat for a day and a half and then was hospitalized. She had nothing but liquids (no wheat, no dairy, little sugar, etc.) in the hospital and went back to regular eating about 4 or 5 days after she had stopped. In that time she more or less fully recovered and felt well. We went home for Christmas, the next day we had huge chicken salad sandwiches on whole-grain bread with milk, and that night she was suddenly doubled over again. She went into the hospital for another couple of days and then returned, but we watched the diet closely for a while at home after that visit, so she didn’t go right back to “normal” as far as eating was concerned. And she hasn’t another serious flare-up since then. Here’s the shocking 2+2 that I hadn’t put together until recently: According to all the research done by doctors specializing in allergy and food sensitivity, about 4-6 days after eliminating a problem food from the diet, the immune system goes through a brief period of hypersensitivity to that substance. Those doctors would detect allergies by the surefire method of elimination for four days followed by ingestion of a little of the food. Patients with bad problems had all kinds of bizarre reactions and sometimes went catatonic in these trials (even in double-blind experiments done by Rinkel in the 40’s and 50’s). Coincidence? I’m not convinced.
More to come as we move forward. The great news is that there is hope for those with Crohn’s disease. We’re at the beginning of our journey and the future already looks promising. Of course, the “future” that Jen has her eye on might best be captured in the question, “So – when can I have chocolate again?”
Hopefully I’ll be have time to post details about the classical education conference in the next day or two. In the meantime, do take a moment to read this brief but “informative” essay by historian Neil Postman. It’s a tiny taste of the type of thing we enjoyed at the conference. You won’t regret it.
My wife and I will be traveling to a classical education conference in Austin, TX this week so I will be comparatively unavailable for the next few days. The conference is mandatory attendance for her (she teaches at a classical school here in OK) and I thought I’d tag along. The theme is “Recovering Goodness, Truth and Beauty.” I look forward to having some interesting things to write about upon my return. Among the workshop speakers are Douglas Wilson and his son, N.D. Wilson. Back in a bit.
Perhaps I ought to have titled this “how to re-import your whole CD library, originally done in Windows, when your external USB drive’s HFS+ partition coughs up a bowl of bits.” I looked all over the internet to try to get an indication of the best or most efficient way to rip, tag, and organize my disc collection in Linux Mint. I found a lot of information, and a lot of “articles” that were really just thinly disguised spec lists of FOSS audio programs. In the end I was forced to figure it out on my own as a result of having too many options.
The good news is that, for an aspiring audiophile, EAC runs under WINE in Linux Mint (rel. 5) with no trouble. You can read a pretty concise formulation of the procedure required to make it happen here. That’s the first route I went. It wasn’t particularly easy from there.
See, I’m one of those wierdos who regularly keeps digital music in more than one format. I prefer “lossless” files, but the portable music players available to me (and my car CD player, that reads MP3) won’t play those. Not to mention that they’re bigger than lossy files. For this reason, I must have at least two formats available. My practice up to the present has been to keep FLAC on hand for home listening, MP3 for comparatively high-quality listening with devices that read no other format, and ogg for maximum compression with devices that can use it. (I do prefer to use free software and open standards whenever possible.) Properly speaking, then, I have three music libraries to manage. And I have a lot of music.
After some experimentation, I discovered that the familiar batch conversion tools that I intended to use in order to keep all these libraries straight (especially tagging in all those formats) would have to run through EAC. Those tools (WinXP versions) were a lot fussier in WINE. It’s important to understand that I was trying to avoid, at all costs, the need to write a bunch of file- and filename-conversion scripts. Originally I began ripping the discs in EAC and pulling the raw .wavs over into Sound Converter. I quickly realized that Sound Converter didn’t give me the flexiblity over the command-line encoding options that I needed, so that plan was out. I further realized that no tagging was being preserved in the EAC -> Sound Converter process, so I implemented a third step and a third piece of software, EasyTag, to (hopefully) pull info from CDDB. By this time, managing the directory structure and file info in just one format was a hassle. What’s more, I could see I’d need to add another software step or two before it was a working chain. I dropped back to punt.
I thought, “Surely there’s an easier way.” There is. But it doesn’t involve EAC at all, and that kept me from using it for a while. When I finally gave in it was a good day. The piece of sofware that will do it all for you (with most of the tweaks you want) is called grip. Grip works, and I’m glad. It uses cdparanoia to rip discs, unless you tell it to use another program, and that’s fine with me. As far as I can tell, comparing rip-for-rip with EAC, cdparanoia makes a really accurate copy (provided your drive doesn’t cache). In fact, you can tell cdparanoia to be stupidly accurate if you want. Grip encodes to FLAC, mp3, ogg, aac, and more, and it gives you full control over the encoding options. I just realized that I’m sounding like an ad for grip, which isn’t intentional, but it’s really so much better and easier – even easier than what I was doing in Windows. At least, it’s easier while managing one format library at a time, which is what most sensible people do. With grip, once your “config” tabs are set up, you can reduce the whole process to a few clicks per CD (or less) and a sanity check on the autotagging. Grip creates linux-friendly filenames for your tracks and automatically puts audio files into a reasonable directory structure, which you have control over through tag editing prior to ripping. What a great idea.
Now I’ve arrived at the final juncture of library organization #1 much faster than I had hoped as a result of both grip and amaroK, a fully-featured and functional software jukebox (that’s the fastest description I could concoct). But I’m still going to have to do at least one of the things I was originally trying to avoid: write a script to convert the FLAC library I have been recording to both MP3 and ogg, keeping the directory structure intact. Oh well. Some things can’t be avoided. Unless there’s an approach out there that hasn’t turned up under any of my query strings. In any case, at least I can listen to a shuffled version of my entire lossless music collection while I write the script…
[ Note: if you didn't do a good job with your directory structure, amaroK will fix it all up for you (that's putting it lightly) with the "Manage Files..." --> "Organize Files..." command in the right-click menu. But beware running that command on your whole collection. It blows your CPU to bits. (Yes, intended.) ]
Wesley J. Smith has recently posted a article about a new bill that has been brought to the Canadian legislature. The purpose of the bill is to legalize euthanasia, along with many other “peripheral” details. I didn’t know what to say when I looked at the list of provisions in the bill. All I could think of was the tragic resemblance of the current legislation of developed nations to dystopian novels I’ve read. What are we thinking?
