Why should music teacher educators pay attention to the global crises of economy and climate

Abstract

This paper takes the relationship between the macro, meso and micro levels of society as its point of departure, with music teacher education as its case. The attention is directed towards how musical leadership, in this case the leadership of music teacher education faces dilemmas of an ethical, political and professional character and discusses if and how such dilemmas can possibly be dealt with. Based on a theoretical ground that affords the present social-cultural condition of our western societies to be described as one of modernity in its extremes (Giddens) we can see how the self driven dynamics of social systems (Luhmann, Latour) actualize terms such as the risk society and reflexive modernity (Beck). Within this, one of the driving, political forces at all levels is the neo-liberalist priorities of the New Right (Woodford). The situation directs attention to the coherence between the political ideals that, albeit unintended, lead to crises like global warming, the world economy decrease and the oil catastrophe in the Mexican gulf, and the marketization of higher education (Naidoo) which characterizes recent thought about educational quality worldwide. According to those neo-liberalist educational priorities the students have come to be regarded as customers and knowledge as a commodity, while concepts such as knowledge production, useful knowledge, and knowledge economy have come to the fore along with ideals of measurability and quantitative assessment. The present paper addresses 3 particular leadership challenges in this connection. The first challenge concerns the dilemma of keeping up with the prevailing politics and ideals promoting relevance quality in music teacher education whilst simultaneously training student music teachers to criticize those politics included its built-in notions of relevance. The second concerns the leaders’ maintenance of a system critical competence as part of their professionalism as a leader in connection with the dilemma between maintaining the present regime and being capable to adapt to new regimes and paradigm shifts in the future. The third concerns the possible responsibility to address the mismatches between societal development and humanist educational ideals along with non-instrumentalist notions of knowledge that stands out as particularly transparent when seen through a music educational lens – for the sake of education in general but also for the sake of society and culture at large.