A few months ago I began working for Little Kids Rock, a national music education nonprofit based in New Jersey, USA. I am excited to work with this organization, in large part because of its mission:
We transform lives by restoring, expanding and innovating music education in our schools.
I find this mission, and the core values of the organization (including commitment to kids and teachers, being respectful, accountable and inspirational) incredibly motivating, enabling and empowering. And the team of staff at Little Kids Rock, led by the energy-field CEO, David Wish, is so positive and confident as to make anything seem possible. Shortly after I joined Little Kids Rock a book was published that I’d been working on for a couple of years – Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning. I saw in the writing of my peers, numerous provocations to inspire a generation of radical educational thinkers. I also realized, cycling to work one morning through a New Jersey suburb: Little Kids Rock is a punk!
Across the US (and indeed much of the world), schooling increasingly perpetuates oppressive modes of colonial and neo-colonial oppression, reducing music education to a set of consciously and unconsciously reified practices that serve more often than not to choke students’ creativity and capacity for expression, inhibiting the humanizing potential of music in schools. Little Kids Rock works with teachers, schools, districts and university music teacher educators across 46 states to curate communities of active resistance to a poisonous cultural status quo. Confronting and challenging the traditional North American model of music education as large-ensemble replicative performance, Little Kids Rock trains teachers to subvert normative and exclusive, symbolically violent curricula and pedagogical models, proposing and embedding an alternative approach based on collaborative learning and development of creative and improvisational facility through culturally responsive repertoire and learning practices.
Keith Kahn-Egan sets out broad characteristics of punk (whilst acknowledging the irony and complexity inherent in trying to describe something that deliberately and even aggressively evades capture and to its core resists pigeonholing and careful description!). Here follow his five punk premises, each followed by a brief explanation of how Little Kids Rock meets it.
A sense of anger and passion that finally drives [one] to say what’s really on his or her mind.
Little Kids Rock is a leader in a powerful movement taking place in music education in the USA. Since, and indeed long prior to the Tanglewood Symposium in 1967 (over half a century ago!), ‘progressive’ music educators have been trying in small numbers to bring alternative and ‘popular’ music and appropriate pedagogies into schools. In many cases they have succeeded, but the overwhelming majority of music education in the US is not suited to the students it ought to be serving. Frustration and bewilderment at this perpetual systemic inertia led to Little Kids Rock crafting and pursuing it mission. Little Kids Rock has now galvanized a national movement, and is finally accepted as not only relevant but essential to the field, right up to the Executive Director of the National Association for Music Education (NAfME).
The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic, which demands that we do our own work because anybody who would do our work for us is only trying to jerk us around.
It would be inaccurate to assert that the organization’s board or founder think that anyone’s trying to jerk them around. If anything, the opposite is true – Little Kids Rock has earned a tremendous amount of respect at the state government level around the nation. But a DIY Ethic? Heck yeah!! Little Kids Rock founder, David Wish, decided that since no-one else was going to change American music education (after 50 years of talking about what a good idea it would be), we’ll do it ourselves. ‘DIY’ of course rarely means doing things completely alone – rather, it involves collaborating with the right people on mutually agreeable terms to get the things that you need to get done, done.
A sense of destructiveness that calls for attacking institutions when those institutions are oppressive, or even dislikeable.
Little Kids Rock has not really taken destructive action per se (the Modern Band programs activated by Little Kids Rock are additive to existing music education offerings, rather than destructive of others – despite perceptions by some with vested interests in maintaining the inherently destructive systems of the canonized past); but it has certainly called out the stasis – bordering on rigor mortis – that characterizes much music education across the country. If Little Kids Rock’s passionate pursuit of its heartfelt mission has attempted to destroy anything, it is this systemic apathy to the entropy enveloping music education in the US.
A willingness to endure or even pursue pain to make oneself heard or noticed.
Little Kids Rock has received its fair share (and then some) of criticism, abuse and misrepresentation in the decade and a half it has been pursuing its mission. But, living the lyrics of the Chumba-Wumba song “Tubthumping” – “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down” – Little Kids Rock’s indomitable spirit and gritty determination to revolutionize music education nationwide are true hallmarks of the organization’s ethos.
A pursuit of the “pleasure principle”, a revelling in some kind of Nietzchean chasm.
Making music is a vital component of the human condition, and good for people down to our cores. Working with children in schools to create meaningful music with them, as students develop identities, work ethics, creativities and cultural literacies, is as fulfilling an end as maybe any educator could ever seek. Basically, making music is incredibly good fun. Everyone knows this. And this is one of the main reasons Little Kids Rock continues to see such resounding success. Doing things that feel good is good for us all.
Little Kids Rock’s dynamic work in K-12 classrooms across the US provides vital punk resistance and viable, popular alternatives to an exclusive and anachronistic set of ingrained assumptions and practices in music education. Little Kids Rock teachers and students daily enact punk resistance, foment critical punk consciousness, and activate punk DIY praxes and creativities among the current generation of youth. Embracing learning of empowerment, identity, agency and self-expression through making original, personally meaningful music, this punk nonprofit and its punk pedagogical approach are together revitalizing music education.
References
Bestley, R. 2017. Art Attacks: Punk Methods and Design Education. In GD. Smith, M. Dines & T. Parkinson, T. (eds.) Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kahn-Egan, S. 1998. Pedagogy Pissed: Punk Pedagogy in the First-Year Writing Classroom. College Composition and Communication 49.1: 99–104.
Mark, M.L. no date. From Tanglewood to the present. National Association for Music Education: https://nafme.org/wp-content/files/2015/12/5-MENCFromTanglewood.pdf
Smith, G.D. 2017. Embodied Experience of Rock Drumming. Music + Practice, 3. http://www.musicandpractice.org/
Smith, G.D., Dines, M. & Parkinson, T. (eds.) 2017. Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning. New York, NY: Routledge.