ABSTRACT
It is often stimulating to try and forecast what the future of something is going to be, even more so for an educator or educational researcher. It seems that things are vastly more difficult to predict when education comes to the discussion. How are education, music education, and music-technology education going to be any different in 10, 20, or 100 years time? One way to engage with the question would be to look at how education changed over the past 10, 20, and 100 years and assess the outcome of the changes or, more efficiently, the ‘types’ of changes that occurred. This is obviously not a deterministic assessment: opinions would vary. But some agreement would probably be made that matters have shifted from the old-fashioned notion that a student comes to the educational context as an ‘empty vessel’ apprentice into which the master pours his wisdom. Another established accord would probably be that learning is usually socially located and very rarely able to occur in a vacuum. Over the years, these continually scrutinised assessments led to the understanding that the ‘acquisition of knowledge’, although extremely important, is something very different to the ‘communication of knowledge’, and a step further to the ‘fostering of the acquisition of knowledge’, and, ideally, the ‘enabling of the creation of new knowledge’. This progression is by no means an established model to be found in a textbook about the evolutionary sociology of education; it is, rather, a summative way to look at the shift of focus from ‘learning’ (the acquisition of knowledge), to ‘being taught’ or ‘trained’ (the communication of knowledge), to ‘becoming a learner within a group where learning is constructed’ (the fostering of the acquisition of knowledge), and, finally, to ‘acquiring critical thinking in order to be able to contribute to knowledge’ (enabling the creation of new knowledge). This latter focus on critical thinking is what I believe to be the one most defining (but not immediately obvious) difference between past and contemporary educational foci. What makes critical thinking relevant in a chapter about music, technology, and education, is, admittedly, not clear at this juncture. Hopefully, this will be resolved once my views (and some evidence) are presented demonstrating the strength of these entwined concepts. Before such an attempt, however, it is essential to acknowledge that forecasting the future of education is also challenging because of what we and our past experiences bring into this discussion, both individually, and as a whole, socially. This is not only because people’s present (and future) attitudes are strongly interwoven with and shaped by their experienced level, quality, and access to education, but also because education is believed to be a mirror of past and present collective (i.e. societal) attitudes and social ethics. This might appear to be a somewhat vicious circle, or a chicken-and-egg problem, especially when we are reminded by key stakeholders in the media (see e.g. NACCCE 1999; Robinson 2011; Robinson and Aronica 2013) that we are now preparing students for jobs that do not yet exist, to serve industries yet to be defined. How do we educate the future workforce for these unidentified industries, how do we prepare people to carve the uncarved niche, and how do we foster the opening of the unopened pathway?
