Music Education's "Legitimation Crisis" and Its Relation to One-Dimensional Thinking

Overview & Synopsis

This essay addresses behaviorism in music education and its possible connections to a kind of technicist thinking, first described by Herbert Marcuse, that ritualizes concepts and reduces them to a series of brute operations or behaviors. Labeled "technological rationalization" by early critical theorists, the mindset has potentially negative repercussions for education in general and music education specifically. I discuss the paradox of how we must grapple with increasing pressure to move toward a collapsed view of music's various and conflicting aesthetic and artistic meanings in our constant quest for curricular legitimacy in this era of objectives-based instruction.