Posted by Dale on October 18, 2002 at 16:27:37:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: What music degrees lack? posted by Rick Denney on October 18, 2002 at 15:51:01:
Rick's question "Why do musicians go to college" deserves more than one answer, since like everything of value in life there is more than one facet which makes "things" valuable. I'll share one facet, and (likely) true to form it will be one of the least popular answers.
The Art department at my college was next door to the buildings I spent a lot of time in when I was a music major at a not-terribly-renowned music department (hadn't even attained status as a "School of Music" yet.) Often a convenient short-cut on campus was through that "art" building, and frankly I was appalled at most of the stuff being produced as "art" by "art students." I am not talking Mapplethorpe-appalling, I am talking just plain bad! After being told that 2/3 of the upper division as well as grad students in that department werew scholarship recipients, my face must have gone ashen with disbelief, and the Student Services Director that I worked for explained to me that "tenured profs need to keep their jobs."
I sincerely believe that most of what is wrong with education today is in the fact that accept, as criteria for measuring the success of a program, some horribly simple metric like "twenty-seven students graduated."
So I've pointed out two (of the many) reasons why so many are in school, first that teachers need jobs (and will go through the motions regardless of who they have to work with or their actual abilities) and second, that as long as we allow sheer body counts to amount for anything even implying accomplishment, there will always be a nagging afterthought along the lines of "what exactly did all that activity accomplish??"