Introduction: Why Look at Music Education from a Sociological Perspective?

The question heading this introductory chapter often is asked by people who wonder why musicians need knowledge of society at large to be fine music teachers, a question to which this book provides a possible answer. Most immediately, of course, sociologists do not generally engage in questions of how to teach music. But sociological thinking can clarify our own beliefs about why and what we teach. We learn to understand our own actions as the result of larger cultural, political, and economic constellations that shape our country’s societal values and sociocultural traditions.