Philosophy of Music Education Review

Øivind Varkøy challenges music educators who start their educational work from well-defined learning outcomes and who then test and assess whether students have achieved these predefined ends. He argues that "ends-means-thinking," "assessment-thinking," and "some sort of market-philosophy" all relate to 'instrumentalism' in which learners are treated as instruments for the ends—as products of the educational industry—that the teacher or society has set. Instrumentalism, as the general enemy of humanism, appears in many forms in music education, standardized tests being only one example. In his alternative philosophical view, Varkøy leans on the Norwegian philosopher, Hans Skjervheim, and his Kantian critique according to which pupils should be treated as ends in themselves instead of things or means.

Many of the implications of instrumentalism, as described by Varkøy, may be identifiable in music education and explain why education is so easily reduced to tekhne instead of being praxis. However, I doubt whether the problem is in our thinking through ends and means of music education as such. Should not we as music educators constantly consider whether our ends need reconstruction and whether the means we use in our teaching are leading to the ends to which we think they should be leading? Are instrumentalist ideas in general against ethically oriented music education or might it be possible to be a sort of instrumentalist and at the same time promote the humanistic value of individuality that seems to be important for Varkoy?

John Dewey's pragmatism was one of the targets of Skjervheim's philosophy, the backdrop of Varkøy's approach. For Skjervheim, Dewey's idea of human being represents "the instrumentalist fallacy" and what Skjervheim called "naturalistic-positivistic-pragmatic thinking."¹ In Dewey's pragmatist philosophy, the human being is an active being whose knowledge results from experimenting and trying out. Dewey thus rejects the "spectator" view in which the thinking individual is set against the material and social world where actions are thought to take place. The human being is unavoidably part of various social networks and develops in the relational and interactive world. The "I" is a participant self, an active agent. Thus, Skjervheim's critique hits the nail on the head in a certain respect: Dewey did reject the kind of humanistic view in which the self is fixed with such innate dimensions that should be found or recovered, in which the [End Page 72] ideal self is living an autonomous subjective life as separate from the surrounding environment.²

In Dewey's naturalism, the relational nature of experience implies a situated view in which the thinking and knowing of the human agent is seen as instrumental to the situation. Practical actions, as operational and embodied, like when [Johnny] plays the guitar, become organic parts of the continuum of experience. In Johnny's "musical laboratory" chords are tried out and tested over and over again against models as well as imagined possibilities and the experimenting gives Johnny satisfaction and motivates him for hours of practicing. In this view, any intellectual resolution occurs within action and deliberation starts with the practice and situation. The technical is embodied in action as a whole but does not imply a technocratic—or much less, a positivist³ —attitude to education, which was the fear of Skjervheim.⁴ Yet, quite rightly, the deliberation between musical means and ends in its technical sense is not enough when estimating the intrinsic or instrumental character of learning experience and its quality. We need closer analysis that recognizes the complexity of experience.

Dewey's philosophical emphases guide us to examine the quality of learning experience and the educativeness of music studies in relation to the student's experience as a whole. While studying music Johnny experiences how his life-goals meet or do not meet with what is taking place in school. He experiences how enjoyment of learning is or is not part of his musical doing, how thinking and doing, facing problems and solving problems result in knowledge that again helps, or does not help, in forming ever...