I admit it.  I was wrong.  For as long as I can remember I have been promoting, advocating and fighting for music as an academic subject.  I rejoiced with my colleagues when ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act)  was passed and by law, music was listed as academic.  I have believed in doing whatever I needed to do to make music look like other subjects; similar questioning and engagement techniques, similar yet authentic assessments down to how you format essential learning outcomes and standards.  As music educators, we’ve worked hard to have our colleagues in other subject areas and administrators take us seriously as an academic subject.  Perhaps too hard.  I’m beginning to see I may have been wrong.  Music is not academic, it is organic.

Organic.  Completely natural.  Not something created by humans but firmly integrated within our human DNA.  Not something that has to be taught but cultivated instead.  Last year I had a student ask me why we had to go to music class.  My answer included physical education as well.  As human beings, we naturally want to move.  We roll over, reach, touch, crawl, walk and dance to music.  Then when we get to school, hopefully the PE teacher takes those organic, natural instincts and enhances them, using their knowledge of physiology, anatomy and child development to help students skip, run, jump and gallop.  We throw, toss and kick, using what is inside of us since birth.  It’s the same with music.  Remember when you used to sit and sing songs while you played, danced to music you heard or played “drums” on pots and pans? That is because it is part of who we are at birth.

Music, dance and visual arts are organic.  It’s something already inside of us as human beings, present in every culture and society in the world.  Archeologically speaking, evidence has been found that shows us that humans were creating art and music thousands of years ago.  It comes from a need to express ourselves, to communicate in a deep way with others or to record things we’ve seen, felt or done. Pretty sure I’ve never seen any mathematical equations written on cave walls or handmade slide rules made out of bone.

Now, I’m not saying that because a “subject” is organic that it shouldn’t be studied and/or improved upon.  I believe it is more important to cultivate those over other subjects that were created by humans. Unfortunately, we tend to look at anyone who does music, dance, visual art, or has some kind of physical prowess as being talented when in truth, chances are that person has taken his or her organic gifts and worked to improve themselves.

At my school, because I teach something outside of reading and math, or subjects considered “academic”,  I am labeled a specialist.  Is it because I focus on a subject that others feel uncomfortable with?  After all, our culture has taken something everyone can do at the beginning of their lives, deemed a few “talented” and apparently that’s all that’s important in terms of music.  Something that was so natural as a child has turned into something they are afraid of.  Perhaps if there was the same emphasis on the organic as there is on those academics created by man, we would retain more of our “human-ness”.  As I observe society today, it’s hard not to see a correlation between lack of emphasis on the organic in our schools and the deterioration of our culture.  Perhaps that’s what happens when education attempts to make all children the same in subjects  that are NOT organic and those children begin to forget what it means to be human.  Just a thought.

So rather than a specialist, perhaps I could be an organic facilitator?  How would that change how I think about where children are in their musical development?  How would that change the way I define and organize musical elements for students?  Could it be a more natural process?  Perhaps I should allow students to make music on their own and assist them in identifying the elements, giving them options in terms of creating.

As music educators, we’ve been fighting to be taken seriously as an academic subject for a long time.  Maybe it’s because we never were in the first place.  Maybe we’re something much more important, something separate from the cold world of curriculum and assessments, something that keeps us human in the best sense of the word.  Something organic.