The focus of today’s education seems to be to change one
focus away from the arts and on to the sciences, as a guitar teacher and educator in creative
thinking this is become a concern to me.
Over the past few months it has become obvious that pupils
and parents have changed their attitude. There has been a general fear of
missing any time from academic lessons even for 20 minutes to half an hour a week
in order to learn a musical instrument. If they only knew what goes on in the
course of a day at school where there are obvious moments where the teaching
day is disrupted because of illness and lessons being covered by other teachers
or just down time because of some other event like children misbehaving.
I know through personal experience of the 40 years of
teaching and playing the guitar, artistic subjects activate areas of the brain
which are virtually untouched in academic learning. However the government
guidelines to things such as not taking any time off for holidays during the
term time has meant parents have become terrified of their children falling
behind in academic lessons.
Also statements like ‘we should be like the Chinese, we
should work much harder as do other countries children’ this is fine if you
want to make them into a number of robots. I have no problem with somebody
wanting to be a scientist or engineer if they want to, but trying to turn
people who are artistically inclined that way seems to be quite ridiculous.
To me it looks like education targets are being set by the
accountants of the world of education with their tick box mentality in order to
the next stupid ideology in order to win an arms race of education against
other countries.
learn to play in a band in three days
