ABSTRACT
What Robert Pirsig calls a ‘method of teaching pure quality’ centres on getting students to see for themselves. Instead of writing essays on awkward abstractions such as ‘the USA’, or the city in which they happen to live, or even just one street, they are asked to think about just one building; ‘start with the upper left-hand brick’ (p. 185). Once again we confront the healthy and natural pull of the intuitive against the analytical. We re-visit the knowledge dialectic from the perspective of teaching and learning. Can we plan a curriculum for what we cannot define? Can we teach what we cannot define? Can we assess what we cannot define? For ‘writing’ we could very easily substitute ‘music’. So let us begin with the musical equivalent of the upper left-hand brick as an entity intuitively grasped and see where it leads in teaching music. In this chapter I shall concentrate on what is sometimes called the general music class, that part of formal music education in schools which-in many countries-is mandatory for all children. The principles brought out here have implications also for college music courses and instrumental teaching, though specialist teaching is given more sustained attention in the following chapter.
