ABSTRACT

One way of looking at the problem of teacher productivity is to ask ourselves how much music we would have heard had we lived, say, in Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’. Compared with the man in the street’s repertoire today it would not have amounted to much – a few folk songs, a ballad or two, some hymns and some psalm tunes, little else. No symphony concerts, no beat groups, no opera, no jazz, no LP recordings, no radio, no television, no film tracks to provide the background of musical experience which is now inescapable. Alternatively, we may consider just how meagre the layman’s survey of the world from China to Peru must have been in the eighteenth century, how limited his mental images of foreign lands and ways of life were before the camera and the cathode ray tube helped to familiarize him with them on the screen, in the colour supplements, glossy magazines, posters, newspapers and all the other pictorial illustrations with which his daily life is wallpapered. Musically and geographically, the modern range of knowledge and experience has been vastly enlarged by new technologies of communication. In ’The Deserted Village’ yokels and squire alike stood in awe of the schoolmaster’s erudition:

And still they gazed and still the wonder grew That one small head could carry all it knew

– whereas today any eleven-year-old’s store of information is almost certainly greater than the pre-industrial pedagogue’s ever was. It is the difference between a broadsheet and a well-stocked library. Moreover, a great deal of this amassing of information takes place regardless of the existence of formal education, so that it is arguable that the 11-year-old’s advantage would not be seriously jeopardized even if there were no schools!