Potential contributions of music education to peacebuilding: curricular concerns

Abstract

This article examines the potential role of music education in peacebuilding, specifically concentrating on issues of structural, indirect violence often unwittingly perpetuated through Eurocentric music curricula. I point out that such violence occurs not only in curricula that represent only European classical traditions, but moreover in the pedagogical practices or the ways in which music is represented. I draw on Walter Mignolo’s work on the decolonizing project as well as David Hansen’s theories of cosmopolitan education  to theorize what a decolonized music education might look like. Ultimately, I turn to Mignolo’s encouragement of pluriversal cosmopolitanism to develop my own ideas of what a cosmopolitan music education might look like, how it contributes to decolonizing, and thus how it might foster peacebuilding at the levels of both structure and the individual student.

Keywords:

• Music
• peacebuilding
• education
• structural violence
• music curricula
• Eurocentrism
• ethnomusicology
• decolonization
• cosmopolitanism

Notes

1. See also Urbain’s analysis of Galtung’s theory of peace in this issue.

2. Cremin also proposes that Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence can align with Galtung’s theory of structural and cultural violence, and that it potentially offers stronger theoretical tools for thinking about peace education (Cremin 2016, 13).

3. This can also be understood through applying Paulo Freire’s critique of the ‘banking’ method of education in which students are oppressed by being treated as empty vessels waiting to be given knowledge by their teachers (1970).

4. Hess offers several other important critical examples, although they are more relevant to curricula of world music at the level of tertiary education. This includes the norms emphasized in audition practices (cf Koza 2008), the hiring practices regarding ‘culture bearers,’ and the scheduling practices of world music classes (Hess 2015).

5. See also, e.g. his delineation of ‘anthropos’ vs. ‘humanitas’ (Mignolo 2011).