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Justifying music in the national curriculum: The habit concept and the question of social justice and academic rigour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2018

Elizabeth Bate
Elizabeth Bate*
Affiliation:
Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DQ
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In June 2015, the British government presented ‘the social justice case for an academic curriculum’ as the justification for recent radical changes to educational policy. However, this justification failed to account for both the key changes in the newly-revised National Curriculum for Music and the place of music in the National Curriculum as a whole.

Through a critical evaluation of the National Curriculum for Music, this study will propose how the place of music could successfully be justified within an education system wholly committed to ‘social justice’. Using the ‘habit concept’ of classical philosophical pragmatism, it will assess how and why music's educational value should be understood not through its ‘academic rigour’ but through its distinctive, inherently destabilising nature.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Music Education , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 3 - 15
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018

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