Miuic in education
number of different subjects. Efforts have been made to improve the
situation by ‘re-educating teachers’, that is to say by giving them a
lengthy course of theoretical and practical training in music teaching.
We admit, however, that this is only a provisional arrangement; the
real solution is to train a large body of music teachers able to meet the
needs of the whole country. This scheme, regarded as one of the great
problems of educational administration, is already being gradually
implemented.
In order to bring home to you the importance of music education
at the primary school stage, I must now give a brief account of the
very special place which music occupies in our society.
The Japanese people are known to have a real passion for music.
It is a curious fact, however, that very few have a technical knowledge
of the subject, and the study of music is confined to specialists, who
form only a very small section of the population.
The paradoxical state of affairs can no doubt be attributed to many
different causes, such as the relatively recent establishment of organi-
zations responsible for spreading a knowledge of music, or the question
of the people’s purchasing power. Nevertheless, the most fundamental
cause is sociological, namely, that in Japan there is very little relation-
ship between music and practical life.
Hence the importance of music education in primary schools, where
the principal aim is to develop a spontaneous love of music among the
pupils, and so enable them to experience the joy that music can bring
to them in their daily lives, not only at home, but in society.
After this brief outline of some of the problems of music education,
I should now like to give a few practical details.
TEACHING OF SIGHT-READINGPupils are taught to read music from the first primary school year
onwards. Apart from a few pupils who have learnt something at home
or in a kindergarten, most first-year pupils have absolutely no idea of
sight-reading. In order to teach pupils to sing or to play an instrument,
all sorts of different methods have been invented to awaken their
interest.
In the third year, pupils begin to be able to read and sing music. They
start with C major and in the fourth year they learn C, F and G; in the
fifth year, D and B flat are added, and in the sixth year they learn A and
E flat. It is a gradual training, involving the successive study of in-