In reading Chapter 6 “Factory and Production” of Estelle Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education, I was conflicted with her view of music education as a factory enterprise. More specifically, the undertone that factories, with their “standardized machines, parts processes, and products”, might be great for making potato chips but are awful at producing music students. I believe that these large-scale operations, the large ensembles in the music education sphere, do not, as Jorgensen states, “undermine the power and life of musical traditions,” but instead provide great arenas for the development of students.
In describing her factory metaphor, Jorgensen touches briefly on the idea of specialization. Factory workers specialize on a specific aspect of the assembly process as “multiple repetitions of particular tasks suggest that the quality of a potato chip made by a team of specialists may be more uniform than one made entirely by generalists.” While not stated outright, I believe Jorgensen is insinuating that schools that are setup like a factory result in teacher’s that are unable to teach the whole student and that course curriculum becomes too narrowly focused on a teacher’s skill and thus the students are robbed of a full education. I believe that specialization is a positive power that schools should do a better job of harnessing. The most successful band programs I’ve seen have a team of teachers that are highly skilled, specialized, and most importantly, complementary of each other’s skill sets. Specialization only becomes a problem when you hire a group of teachers that all do the same thing well. A dynamic and diverse group of educators is the best way to provide a quality education.
Factories, over time, have become more efficient, allowing for a greater creation of goods at a lower price. These factory improvements, while perhaps good for the general public (lower cost goods) has had a negative impact on the workers inside the factory. Adding in the idea of the factory manager who is looking to cut costs, I’ve seen first-hand school administrators whose main consideration for determining whether or not a class will exist in the course catalog is the number of students that that class can hold a given time. My former administrators were much more interested in having a general Music History class that could hold 35-plus students at a time, than they were in having an International Baccalaureate Diploma Level course that would serve five students. The result was those five students who were most interested and invested in furthering their music education were pushed aside so that the school could find a place to essentially hold the school’s over-populated student body for 90 minutes. In this case, the factory failed its workers and its customers.
The factory is described as becoming less of a human-intensive operation. Think for a moment about a freshman-level English class in college. You have a large number of students, low levels (if any) of one-on-one interaction between professor and student, department mandated materials/literature, and perhaps automated, uninterested faculty. I’d argue that the music classroom (thinking now about large ensemble in either HS or MS) is similar to the English class only in terms of size. Unlike a large lecture setting, large ensembles allow every member to participate in the class discussion, as it were, at the same time. Like a class discussion, some students might have similar or differing thoughts and opinions, and a quality teacher (director) should be able to direct the conversation/musical performance towards the end goal. Furthermore, I’d argue that there can be (and should be) the flexibility for the teacher to change their opinion of that end (musical) goal based on a student’s thoughts.
At this point the large ensemble begins to look less like a mechanized operation and more like a hive mind. At first glance it could look like the bees of the hive are acting like machines. Caring out these highly specialized and specific tasks that allow the hive to survive. However, with a closer look you’ll notice that working together, in large numbers, does not equate to machinery. Independent organisms are working together, under the watchful eye of the queen, to accomplish their goal. For the bees, it’s survival. For the musicians, it’s art.