I saw a photo of MF late in his career accepting an award for all the efforts he made visiting academic institutions. He played events like our Jazz Fest even though he wasn't an actual guest for Jim Carlson's big event. Carlson seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth. Actually I think he's in Florida. His Jazz Festival once seemed like the biggest annual event on the UMM calendar.
There was a major irony staring right at us, in connection to MF's high standing and the respect he won among academic types. Like many brilliant people, people who were pacesetters in their fields, MF dropped out of high school. He dropped out as a child of 15 in Montreal, Canada. He wanted to leave school to more actively pursue a musical career. I thought our public school system was supposed to be such a big boon for everyone. We always place it on a pedestal when talking about it. I would suggest a lot of that was just feel-good rhetoric.
Our public schools do appear to reflect lofty principles. It would seem ludicrous to suggest otherwise. So why would the likes of Ferguson and others see fit to dodge it? I would say the answers are readily apparent. Now, let's consider that there have been constructive changes, albeit carried out rather haltingly. The change is reflected in how much longer the honor roll lists are today. It's a sea change from when I was in school. Schools are much more inclined to give kids positive feedback and to nurture them.
We are in early summer as I write this, a time of year when kids could savor being early in the "summer vacation" which was their reprieve from the drudgery of school. 4-H gave them a better environment than did school. It was assumed that kids would groan about the thought of going back to school. There seemed to be an ethos of "pain equals gain." Except that pain does not equal gain unless you're a young man going through boot camp. And that's part of the problem: fathers of the boomers were involved in World War II. They literally learned to respect their drill sergeants. The result of all that is that we won WWII, never mind that its veterans would pray that we never go through such a thing again.
Parents of the boomers had survived the Great Depression. Pain led to gain as they learned to overcome adversity. Adversity is not an inherently good thing. Today in our age of a constantly healthy stock market and digital/tech blessings, we are not nearly so inclined to see obstacles. Where our kids are concerned, we don't want to think of obstacles at all. We focus entirely on positive, uplifting opportunities to be seized. Our economy is so different. It totally rewards the entrepreneurial spirit. Our public schools needed to adjust to accommodate the new values.
So, progress has been made, but it may not be nearly enough. Before the evolution to our current world, our clunky and monopolistic public school system was developed within the model of the industrial age. The goal was to nurture a submissive working class. We wanted obedient factory workers.
Why do kids learn music within the framework of band and choir? Why not coax them to develop with the guitar and piano, clearly lifelong instruments. A child wanting to learn piano must seek independent lessons. Guitar? Try to order a self-help course. Our education system was skeptical of the lifetime instruments because those instruments might facilitate individual expression. Such expression might be carried out in a rebellious or nonconformist way. In band and choir the director rules, sort of an extension of the drill sergeant.
I played in band for years but learned nothing about popular music song construction. The directors tended to diss popular music as if it lacked rigor or something. As if it were cheap. Well, talk to professionals who actually work in popular music, even country music. It is not cheap or lowbrow at all. It just reaches people on a more organic level. It touches their soul and relates to their lives. It wouldn't enjoy commercial success if it didn't. But of course, so many in academia, at the time I was trying to ascend that ladder, would vigorously dismiss artists who found commercial success, like Leroy Neiman. We were coached to laugh at the mere mention of his name.
Maybe this attitude is less noticeable in academia today. The influx of private money into education has probably helped to solve that. Education drifts off course when the sole source of its funding is government. I was in college when there were so many hippie-type instructors who thought we should flush down the toilet everything we thought we knew. They would want to make a face if they learned you grew up in a typical outstate Lutheran or Catholic church. They'd view such a background as being one of pathology, something to be overcome. But if you told those same hippie types that you adhered to something exotic like Baha'i, they'd gush with interest and admiration. Eastern religions interested them.
Maybe we are more inclined to admire what we do not know. Adherents of all religious faiths are the same human beings with human limitations and weaknesses. Christians accept the premise of sin and believe we can overcome it with faith. It is not a belief system that is worthy of outright dismissal.
Many of the hippie-type instructors began to notice the tremors of change as years progressed. They adjusted for the sake of sheer survival, learning to put on the cloak of societal norms and pretend they never really promoted all the revolutionary garbage. It is true we needed a revolution of sorts to get the U.S. out of the Vietnam war. There was collateral damage from that. We never really wanted to embrace Communism.
I remember my public school years like I was in some sort of prison, especially from the seventh grade on. I never made any decisions about what I wanted to do. You couldn't challenge teachers. Administrators? We viewed them like they were ogres. You see, our elected leaders were lobbied by the corporate world for schools to promote a conformist sameness. That was the world, after all, most kids would enter, holding a job like what we saw with Fred Flintstone. Flintstone's world was the model for the middle class: a dolt who stayed out of trouble, sought fun in innocuous ways and believed in showing up for work on time.
In reality, school administrators should have a beloved position in society as really the best friend of parents, not the ogre who calls only when a child is "in trouble." Why are they in trouble? Are they in trouble because they can't stand the school environment with its smothering influence? I'm writing about education as I remember it, with the knowledge there has been positive change as with honor roll expansion.
We still require students to get up too early in the morning. My God, lighten up! I read many years ago that the reason kids hate school is that "the purpose of school is to prepare them for a world of work which they will often find to be unpleasant." Work has changed, not that it's exactly joyful now, but it's more a matter of stress rather than drudgery. Our high-tech age has wiped out whole swaths of workers who did the tedious stuff. What's left, then, is work that requires analysis. And yes, this brings no small amount of stress. But the discomfort isn't quite as stultifying. It's not like the pathetic husband of the Mary Hartman character in the Norman Lear 1970s sitcom.
There are strategies for dealing with stress, strategies that most companies are quite happy to help dispense. The drudgery of the old days seemed to make people want to consume alcohol. They did their networking not with high-tech means but at the Elks or Eagles clubs on weekends. They drove home impaired by alcohol and we found amusement in such things. Shriners conventions! There's a big slice of Americana.
Shriners did great things. They could have lived without a lot of the social stuff. Today the law combats driving while drunk most decisively. Personally, I consume no alcohol at all, so as not to take any chances. I don't feel I'm missing anything. I occasionally notice people around me ordering an alcohol drink at certain restaurants, and I have to wonder "why?" It was an old badge of maturity.
Our contemporary world is a combination of old and new. Some vestigial old habits and notions remain. Our public school system still seems overly tilted toward the values of the industrial age. Do kids even have to go to a school building every day? Look at the sheer risk of using motorized transportation so much. The recent Hancock school van accident illustrates that. No amount of education received by kids at the Hancock school can ever negate what happened to those injured kids.
Maynard Ferguson built his whole storied career by being freed from the shackles of the public school system. And yet academia came to admire and love him. Ironic and rather strange, I think as someone who was once taught the "B-flat concert scale." In high school I'd be in marching band now. Now there's a quintessential model for conformity.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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