Music in education
ment whose importance is not yet fully realized. The level of crafts-
manship of American trained performers has risen so sharply in recent
years that immigrants find it all but impossible to compete with it.
Even the Metropolitan Opera uses more native than imported talent,
a fact that is all the more significant if one remembers that operatic
training-due to the absence of small opera houses-is perhaps the
least satisfactory yet. Among the celebrated composers, conductors,
performers, teachers and musicologists, the older ones are Europeans
or European-trained; but they are speedily replaced by a rising gene-
ration of extremely competent Americans.
America’s record in music education as an intrinsic part of general
education is even more impressive.
The first half of the present century saw phenomenal changes in the
educational scene. In 1900 there were about 15 million pupils in schools
in the United States of America, 500,000 of them in secondary schools.
The numbers predicted for 1960 (seven short years from now) are
34 million children in elementary plus 8 million in secondary schools.
Enrolments in institutions of higher learning stood at less than 250,000
in 1900; in 1950 the number was 2.5 million. Percentage-wise, the
figures are the same for Canada. No doubt Americans have access to
more educational opportunities than they ever had before.
Until about a century ago, the typical North American elementary
school was a ‘frontier’ institution with a minimum of equipment and a
very narrow curriculum. Since then, American education came under the
influence of men like Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel (all influenced in turn
by Jean- JacquesRousseau),Tolstoy, Dewey and modern psychologists ;
it acquired elaborate curricula and grew in size and equipment until it fi-
nally became‘the largest single public enterprise of the Americanpeople’.
Music education had its share in the dramatic development. The
nineteenth century saw the rise of vocal music teaching in schools. In
1938, Lowel Mason had demonstrated to the School Board of Boston
that music was a profitable subject of instruction, that it was ‘a relife
to the wearisomeness of constant study’... that it seemed ‘to renerve
the mind and to prepare all for more vigorous intellectual action’.
Following the demonstration the board included music in the curri-
culum for the hrst time on a par with reading, grammar and arithmetic-
a happening of tremendous significance often referred to as the Magna
Carta of American music education. ‘Through vocal music’, said the
Boston Board of Education, at that time, ‘you set in motion a mighty
power which silently but surely in the end will humanize, refine and
elevate a whole community.’