In pursuit of knowledge

I recently attended an event where the delegates were split into teams and each asked to plan a different area of the music curriculum. Somewhat confusingly these were not as one might reasonably expect Performing, Listening, and Composing, but Skills, Knowledge, Understanding and Experiences!

Setting aside the fact that you wouldn’t want to plan any of these in isolation from one another, it got me to thinking – how is knowledge different from understanding? In a skills-based subject, are skills knowledge? And how can we develop knowledge if not through experience?

There are some very long held definitions of ‘musical knowledge’ where the term ‘knowledge’ encompasses all forms of musical learning. My favourite is the separation into knowledge how (skills), knowledge about (facts) and knowledge of (too nebulous to pin down – experiential / emotional response!).

However, when we use the term knowledge, and especially knowledge-rich, in education, we usually mean a much narrower definition. We mean knowledge as ‘recall’ (and by extension, ‘understanding’ as the application of that recall). We’re talking about memorizing key facts, which may get you some way to passing a music history exam, but isn’t going to help you become the next Nicola Benedetti.

I have a real problem with the education system’s latest obsession with this type of ‘recall’ knowledge, in terms of its usefulness. This generation of children will most likely always carry Google around in their pocket. Why waste valuable brain space memorizing facts that can be searched in a matter of seconds? Why not concentrate on learning how to process and evaluate information, or developing practical and creative skills that will help our pupils when they hit an overcrowded jobs market just at the point that AI has taken over any job that can be automated?

To me it feels like snobbery. As if we’re trying to turn our children into ‘the right sort of people’ who know all the Kings and Queens of England, the dates of Shakespeare’s plays, and a healthy smattering of Latin vocabulary that they can roll out at a dinner party. But knowledge isn’t an indicator of intelligence, just of the ability to memorise. And we’ve already established that this kind of knowledge is redundant for the 5G generation, so really aren’t we just teaching children how to conform to an outdated system of class-based standards?

But back to music! Being able to recall facts in music is not all that helpful – being able to explain how a violin works doesn’t mean you’ll have any ability to actually play one! But if we can sneak our ideal of different types of knowledge into our ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum, that is a much more useful outcome. Through musical experiences we develop our knowledge of music, but in order to have those musical experiences in the first place we need to develop our knowledge how (skills), and to understand and extend these experiences we may need our knowledge about (facts), but not always!

Crucially, these types of knowledge cannot be isolated from one another. They are completely interdependent and must be planned for holistically. When mapping the curriculum we also need to consider that we want to develop these different types of knowledge across the different strands of performing, composing/improvising, and listening, and that these strands too are interdependent. For example, in the early stages of learning, we can only really compose music that we ourselves are capable of playing, because the medium through which the composition is created is performing, not writing. It is also arguable at primary level that it is hard to perform anything if we haven’t listened to it first!

So when we’re asked to show how our music curriculum is ‘knowledge-rich,’ lets show the wonderful variety of different forms of musical knowledge that we have at our disposal. Let’s make all the other teachers jealous about the wonderful richness of musical knowledge!

Dr Liz Stafford is Editor of Primary Music Magazine, Director of Music Education Solutions®, and Senior Lecturer in Music Business and Professional Studies at LCoM. @DrLizStafford