ABSTRACT
The aim of music education in schools and colleges is to raise to consciousness and purposefully and critically explore a number of musical procedures, experienced directly through the reality of various inter-cultural encounters. Musical procedures can be absorbed and re-used over centuries of time, between vastly differing cultures and across miles of geographical space; people are not irrevocably buried in local life-styles, even though people may have birth there. Musical criticism at whatever level is crucial to the process of formal education. A formal music curriculum has a major role to play in making musical processes explicit. Teachers, musicians and, until recently, western musicologists have tended to subscribe to cultural labelling, perhaps too easily believing certain idioms to be intrinsically inferior, or possibly undeveloped, a more compassionate if patronizing view, or, at least, none of their business. Schools in the society are an essential part, though only a part, of cultural intervention to aid intellectual development, to develop mind.
